Bryan Karetnyk | The Spectator columnists & writers

Reclaiming the siege of Leningrad from the Russian state: Living Pictures reviewed

Take the Red Line north, heading out of St Petersburg, and you’ll eventually reach Courage Square on the city’s outskirts (if you pass Polytechnic you’ve gone too far). From there, it’s a brisk 20-minute walk along the birch-lined Avenue of the Unvanquished to Piskaryovskoye cemetery, home to some 186 mass graves and almost half a million civilians and soldiers who died during the 900-day siege of the ‘hero city’ during the second world war – or, as it’s known to Russians, the Great Patriotic War. Just behind the obligatory statue of Mother Russia watching over the sepulchral hush you’ll find, etched in granite, the words of the poet Olga Bergholz: ‘Know this, you who regard these stones: No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten.

Hitting the buffers: The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, reviewed

‘They’ll slowly undress us first and then kill us, so our clothes won’t get bloody and our banknotes won’t get damaged.’ These words, spoken by Otto Silbermann in Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s The Passenger, are startling. Not because they so perfectly articulate the obscene ethos of Auschwitz but because they were written several years before the fact. Composed in 1938, after its author had escaped the more murderous developments of Hitler’s regime, The Passenger is a tense, nightmarish account of one Jewish man’s attempt to survive in a country that is systematically stripping him of his right to exist. Initially blind to the dangers around him, Silbermann, a respectable businessman, suddenly finds his familiar environment transformed into a perilous hunting ground when a group of brownshirts come pounding on his door.

Looking back on Baku

The discovery of oil in Baku brought Ummulbanu Asadullayeva’s family respect if not respectability. Peasant-born, her grandparents ranked by the time of her birth among the richest in the Russian empire, thanks to the abundance of black gold unearthed on their doorstep. Yet while oil barony went hand in hand with fantastic wealth and political prestige, the changes it wrought privately, such as they were, did little to convert her family into paragons of refinement and cultivation. Luckily for us, the result makes for some very fine reading. Published in Paris in 1945, after Asadullayeva had fled Azerbaijan and completed her émigrée transfiguration into the successful French writer ‘Banine’, Days in the Caucasus is a romantic and gloriously comic account of a heady and turbulent youth spent on the shores of the Caspian.

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