Echoes of a Native Land Two Centuries of a Russian Village
- Binding: Paperback
- Publisher: Random House Inc
- Publish date: 03/01/1999
Description:
In 1990 Serge Schmemann, ninety miles southward into the ancient Russian countryside to search for the estate of his forebears, local tsarist gentry who had been expelled from their home by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
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Drawing on family and state archives and on conversations with aged villagers, he traced the lives of his ancestors, following them into the Gulag or into exile in Europe and America, and in this book he re-creates their vanished world: the timeless pattern of nineteenth-century rural life; the revolutionary hope of the peasants, followed quickly by disillusion; the brutal collectivization of the Stalin years and the depression and depopulation of the late Soviet era. This is a deeply felt evocation of a country that has retained its essential beauty and harmony even in the face of the cruellest ravages of time and history.
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