A Tear in the Curtain: A historical novel
John Symons
Shepheard-Walwyn £9.95
(978-0-85683-292-5)
Church Times Bookshop £8.95 (Use code
CT426 )
AFTER Stalin's death in 1953, a brief window of opportunity for
travel opened. An enterprising schoolmaster in Sussex invited a
Russian boy and three Hungarian siblings to join his family for a
seaside holiday in 1956. It was a great success; but soon the
children returned to their homelands to varying destinies.
The eldest Hungarian was shot with his mother as he sided with
his compatriots in a vain attempt to resist the Soviet suppression
of the Uprising. His brother and sister escaped amid the chaos,
found their way to England, and were adopted by the schoolmaster.
The Russian boy became a model young communist, and eventually a
diplomat, with all the concomitant privileges until . . .
Until the central section of the novel: an extended private
conversation with his grandmother in the family dacha
(country cottage) outside Moscow. In these moving pages, Babushka
took the chance "to tell her only grandson the story of her life,
of the hidden years of the country which they both loved so
much".
This is the history of Russia, but in a form that you will not
have read it before. It is at the same time objective and intensely
personal. It tells us more in a few pages than many more formal
accounts by historians manage in a whole volume. In particular, it
puts the Christian faith, the Orthodox Church, at the centre of the
picture. Academic writers just do not seem to achieve this
perspective - indeed, are often stymied by their reluctance to give
religion the weight that it deserves.
As the occasional footnote illustrates, this is not really
fiction: it is the essence of researched history. The "Akademik
Dmitry", who has also been an influence, is the great Dmitry
Likhachev, who survived the notorious Solovki island prison-camp to
retain his - and Russia's - values. Other real figures appear:
"Father Aleksander" is Fr Men, whose sermons, until his murder in
1990, inspired a generation of young people, as they did Babushka,
when she attended the church near her dacha.
A short review cannot even begin to reveal the riches of this
novel: easy reading, full of insight, inspiring, and leaving one
with conviction that Russia's renewed be-trayal of its moral values
can be only a passing phase.
Canon Michael Bourdeaux is the Founder of Keston Institute,
Oxford.
