Secondhand Time, by Svetlana Alexievich

This oral history covers the periods 1991-2001 and 2002-2012 in Russia and former Soviet republics. Alexievich’s technique is to sit with people, to interview them as they remember the changes since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it’s appalling how many miss Stalin. The sovoks would gladly trade the new cutthroat capitalism that favors the unscrupulous (while everyone with honest jobs struggles and starves) for the iron fist of Stalin. Some ascribe this perversity to Russian sentimentality, simple-minded and simple-hearted; others miss the feeling of being part of something grand – a movement for The People, not for oneself. In the name of The People they worked hard, went to prison, endured torture, starved – and believed. The new system rewards the selfish, its purpose and future meaningless.

She speaks with a man who tortured prisoners under Stalin’s regime, who did that as a job, thoroughly but without joy or vengeance. He remarked that if a true sadist worked among them, they would get rid of him. And what of the woman denounced by a neighbor who lusted after her? She went to the gulag for years, eventually her husband was arrested too. And yet, they remained true believers – Lenin and Stalin were great men, the ideals were worth everything. The feeling of everyone working for the common good was overwhelming – they miss that; it has left a vacuum in their hearts. “With an Iron Fist, we will chase Humanity into Happiness!” Their most precious possessions were their Party cards.

For decades, the death machine worked nonstop… Its logic was brilliant: The victims are accused of being executioners and then, in the end, the executioners themselves become the victims. As though it wasn’t just people running it… Things are only that perfect in nature. The flywheel turns, but there’s no one to blame. No one! Everyone wants to be pitied. Everyone is a victim.

We see the sweep of tribalism: Russia for Russians. Tajiks in Moscow live in basement warrens, robbed and abused, doing work no Russian will touch, and thrown out on a whim, documents confiscated, attacked on the streets by skinheads… Sound familiar? The new economy has enriched gangsters, oligarchs, young people swept up in materialism. During Soviet times, books were precious, often samizdat (published and distributed hand to hand illegally) – but after the Soviet Union fell, no one cared. No Pasternak, no Akhmatova; no Sakharov, no Solzhenitsyn, only money, Italian bathroom fixtures, salami… and vodka. A drunkard nation.

Alexievich interviews mothers whose children were confiscated and raised in mass orphanages, and children who grew up without a mother’s love but with the Party to look up to. And, the bright thread through all the gloom: love. A mother who will do anything for her child. And a woman considered insane by her friends and family for pursuing a man she’d never met, based on a dream she had as a teenager – she knew she was in this life to love him. After two husbands and three children, she found him – a prisoner who had murdered a man. And her love, the Dostoyevskian saintliness of it, broke down every barrier. She made him her life.

Russia is an outsized example of humanity’s potential and pitfalls – in these stories we read extremes of what happens everywhere, because humans are pretty much the same everywhere, only more so in Russia through its unique combination of vast inhospitable lands, simple beauty, and the yearning of the spirit toward something greater than this miserable existence. Hope and love seem more precious and fleeting in the face of starvation, brutality, and repression. These folk and their dreams have been brought to life by the great Russian writers: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn – and now Alexievich.

The Forsyte Saga, by John Galsworthy

Every winter I read a big thick book. This year I chose The Forsyte Saga, which is actually three novels, linked by two short interludes.  The first volume, The Man of Property, was published in 1906, and the final book, To Let, in 1922. The saga is the history of an upper middle class English family whose older generation’s births spanned 1799 to 1820. These ten siblings, a selection of their children, and theirs, are the characters, in scenes set from around 1890 through the early 1920s.

“[Forsytes] are...half England, and the better half too, the safe half, the three percent half, the half that counts. It’s their wealth and security that makes everything possible; makes your art possible, makes literature, science, even religion, possible. Without Forsytes, who believe in none of these things, but turn them all to use, where should we be? My dear sir, the Forsytes are the middlemen, the commercials, the pillars of society, the corner-stones of convention; everything that is admirable.”

In The Man of Property, Soames Forsyte is the epitome of the breed: quiet, snobbish, cold, proper, self-disciplined, possessive. Therein lies the tale. In his youth he meets a beautiful young woman, Irene, and determines to make her his wife. Through persistence he succeeds - but then she realizes she does not love him. To him, she is his most shining possession. To her, he is a jailer - the sumptuousness of her prison means nothing to her.

Irene meets a Forsyte cousin’s fiance, an architect, with whom attraction is immediate and profound. Soames engages the young man to design a house for him, and Bosinney, in consultation with Irene, builds the expensive lovely house, Robin Hill, in a bucolic spot not far from London. But Bosinney and Irene fall in love. He breaks his engagement, she breaks her marriage vows, he dies in an accident and she shuns Soames, who, repulsed by the thought of publicity, does nothing. They live separately, without communication, still married.

The first interlude follows: Indian Summer of a Forsyte, about the last years of Old Jolyon, Soames’s uncle. A great connoisseur of beauty, he buys Robin Hill, a purchase which at the time suits Soames, who hates the house but averts a scandal by not having to advertise it. Old Jolyon provides Irene money to live on, and wills her a generous stipend. He warms in her presence, and reconciles with his own son Jolyon (whose daughter was the architect’s fiancee) and his two children by his second wife.

Now the second novel, In Chancery, opens (chancery is court - the title refers to Soames assisting his sister in her divorce from her drunken spendthrift husband, and Soames finally pursuing his own divorce from Irene). Jolyon the younger, a watercolorist and also a great appreciator of beauty, is a complete anomaly in that acquisitive family. Eventually this Jolyon finds his way to Irene. Soames, by now older and desirous of an heir, finds her still so beautiful that he entreats her to come back and father a child for him. She repudiates him. At last he presses for divorce, to marry a young Frenchwoman he does not love, who bears him a daughter. In an ironic twist, Irene and Jolyon move to Robin Hill, where they have a son.

So ends the second volume. Now we have the weakest section of the book, the mercifully short Awakening, a treacly flight of fancy in the mind of Irene and Jolyon’s son Jon at age eight or nine.

The final book, To Let, opens with Jon and Fleur, Soames’s daughter, both nineteen, meeting by chance. Their cousin and his wife (first cousins to each other, in one of the durable love matches in the saga) host Jon at their country place, where Fleur comes to visit.  The two young people fall in love. Irene and Soames are both appalled by this liaison - the ugliness of their parting will not allow either to make rapprochement for their children’s sakes.

That’s the bare bones of the story. What makes it fascinating is, on the one hand, Galsworthy’s way of plunging the reader into a time and place foreign to us, but guiding us skillfully. Here’s what the Forsytes think of Bosinney’s death:

“In their hearts they would even feel it an intervention of Providence, of retribution - had not Bosinney endangered their two most priceless possessions, the pocket and the hearth?”

On the other hand, the full tale has the symmetry of a composition by Bach - parents who have no use for each other, children who fall in love. They neither lead their elders to reconciliation, nor go as far as Romeo and Juliet to tragic ends. And we see the importance of beauty and love in society - Jolyon wins Irene by gentleness, and by allowing her whatever freedom she wants. Soames, who clenches onto things and people, estranges his young second wife -

“He knew that she knew that they both knew there was no love between them, but he still expected her not to admit in words or conduct such a thing, and he could never understand what she meant when she talked of the hypocrisy of the English.”

His only concern when she has an affair under his very nose, is its effect on his adored daughter: his daughter, he thinks of Fleur, not theirs.

Lest you think Soames a monster or a buffoon, you should read this trilogy - he is so fully developed and so thoroughly human that to scorn him is to scorn ourselves. The possessiveness that is his undoing is a family trait - he is only the most perfect manifestation of it. What he wants to possess is beauty - in addition to Irene, he amasses a formidable collection of paintings, which he chooses with an eye to resale value but nevertheless appreciates while they are his. When he visits the last member of his father’s generation - Uncle Timothy, now a hundred - he reflects that the house should be a museum, for it is a perfect representation of the bygone Victorian world. Every object, adornment, custom in the house exists in a backwater untouched by anything more recent than the Boer War. Yet Soames perceives that these furnishings that meant so much to his childhood have no value in the modern world.

Copious notes assembled by Geoffrey Harvey in the Oxford World Classics edition (1995) illumine Galsworthy’s references, enriching the story for a modern audience.

Step out of time - immerse yourself in a world better and worse than our own.