1967: Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, shocks the World by defecting to the USA, in the midst of the Cold War - leaving behind her 21 year old son and 16 year old daughter.
American lawyer, Peter Horvath has been sent by the CIA to accompany her, as she arrives in New York to a media frenzy. The people of her adopted country are hungry to hear her story, but she is convinced that she just wants to live as an ordinary American, not a celebrity.
Svetlana is a complicated character and soon becomes disillusioned with the life she has chosen. She reaches out to Peter Horvath and as their relationship develops, something blossoms between them - even though he is married.
The Red Daughter recreates the struggles of this extraordinary, troubled woman's search for a new life and a place to belong.
*********************************************************************************
This book is fascinating. Although this is a fictionalised account of the life of Stalin's daughter, John Burnham Swartz manages to weave the historical facts of her life into a compelling tale.
This is greatly enhanced by the fact that the author's own father was the lawyer who actually accompanied Svetlana to the USA, in real life. This allowed John Burnham Schwartz access to a great deal of research information - not to mention the stories of his father, who had a life-long friendship with her, although they did not have a romantic relationship.
I have to admit that I did not know that Stalin even had a daughter before hearing of this book, so I was particularly keen to read it and have found it incredibly interesting. How could I have not know about her? Admittedly, I was born in 1967, so would have been too young to remember the momentous occasion of her defection, but she did not die until 2011 and I cannot remember anything in the press about her then. Strange.
It is hard to imagine what it must have been like to be the daughter of a character such as Joseph Stalin, but this book goes someway towards understanding what her private life must have been like.
How could you ever distance yourself from your father's bloody legacy, and the general population's thirst for macabre details about your family?
I think the simple answer to this is that you cannot. Svetlana had a reputation as a complicated, headstrong and difficult woman, but I think all these go with the territory of being the daughter of someone so horribly infamous, whose shadow inevitably eclipsed her own identity.
The book takes the form of two narratives - that of Svetlana herself and of her lawyer, Peter - which give you a pretty good idea about Svetlana's life, and what motivated her to make the decisions she did - some of these horribly destructive ones.
Svetlana's narrative particularly rings true and allows you to develop a lot of sympathy for this poor woman, who never really fitted in. You follow her as she makes and then later regrets the decisions she has made, but you understand fully why she behaves the way she does. This is a woman desperate to find what is missing from her life, but she is never able to fulfill this wish. It is actually quite a tragic tale about a woman who could not escape the legacy of her family.
I found The Red Daughter completely fascinating, although there are some jumps forward in time that are a bit disorienting, particularly during her later years. However, this did not really detract from my enjoyment of the book. Highly recommended, particularly if you are fond of reading about the fallout from the Cold War years.
No comments:
Post a Comment