In September 1991 Charlotte Hobson, a student of Russian at Edinburgh University, went to study in Voronezh for her year abroad. A decade later she published Black Earth City, an account of her months spent living in Russia’s provincial heartland during the year in which the Soviet Union was finally dismembered, the former dependent states breaking away like the fragmentation of a giant iceberg. Hobson’s award-winning memoir, as dreamily lyrical and pragmatic as any Russian novel, beautifully captured the uncertainty, chaos and infectious euphoria of the end of the cold war.
Fifteen years on, and Hobson has turned to fiction to examine perhaps the most epoch-defining point in Russia’s history – the revolutions of 1917, the dissolution of tsarist rule, the Bolshevik rising, subsequent civil war and its aftermath – choosing a protagonist who, like Hobson herself in Black Earth City, is an English outsider in Russia during a period of turbulence and wild optimism. The result is a rapturous, carnival-like ride into political disorder, heady romance and absurdity as one societal infrastructure is dismantled and replaced with another.
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