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| Black Earth City |
| Charlotte Hobson |
| Granta, 2001 |
Review by Christopher North  |
| This was immediately interesting to me for two reasons: firstly Charlotte Hobson is the wife of Phillip Marsden a travel writer I much admire and secondly her experiences occurred when she was at about the same age as I was when I went to Russia as a student in 1965. I bought the book after hearing her read an extract at the Dartington literature festival – where she read with Helen Dunmore. My main reactions: – This is a book about a year in Voronezh – a city on the Don deep into the forests of White Russia. The author seems about twenty years more mature than I was in 1965 with all my sexual uncertainty and obsessions of the time. On the other hand she was in Voronezh for a year and had been studying Russian whereas I passed through Russia in three weeks and was part of a chess team – not on a language course. The author is self-assured, sassy; a drug-taking, hard drinking young student. She relates her story in part as a love story involving her and a slightly out of focus character Mitya – who comes across as a witty rather intense man on one hand and as a dreary drunk on the other. In fact one comes away with the impression that the Russians as a nation are quietly drinking themselves to death. Charlotte Hobson was in Voronezh when the USSR actually came to an end – and the chapter describing this has a vague Dostoyevskian feel to it which is memorable. The town itself doesn’t quite come to life and the characters aren’t so strongly drawn that they really stick in the mind. That said the book has some fine set-pieces. I enjoyed a sequence concerning the triangle player in the local symphony orchestra (indicating that a surprising amount of mainstream culture was available in this remote city) and her curious encounter with the railway fraternity when she lost her suitcase on a train (because she had a hangover). The despair of the young men and women in the chaotic conditions does however come across and is the stronger for not being underlined. There are no journalistic encounters –this is just the story of what she did and who she met. The party scenes are a little excruciating but at least they are honest. Sample quote – the first passage that struck me: - ‘ The woods have many powers. Their sheer extent – stretching a quarter way around the world, north and east of Voronezh all the way to Vladivostock – draws you in like vertigo. One thousand million pine trees each identical to its neighbor. How many people have vanished into their enormity. How many woodsman live on undisturbed, unaware perhaps, of the fall of communism, or even of the revolution? There were Polish partisans from the last war who did not emerge until the fifties. The Geens, Russian peasants who abandoned or were driven out of their villages in the civil war, were not quelled for a decade: they would burst out of the forest, slaughter villages or Red Army columns and disappear.’ |
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To read too many books is harmful. Mao Tse Tung |
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