The Charm before the Storm

Mary-Kay Wilmers

• Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
  Penguin, 242 pp, £3.95, May 1987, ISBN 0 14 008623 4
• The Russian Album by Michael Ignatieff
  Chatto, 191 pp, £12.95, May 1987, ISBN 0 7011 3109 8
• The Making of a Peacemonger: The Memoirs of George Ignatieff prepared in association with Sonja Sinclair
  Toronto, 265 pp, £15.00, July 1985, ISBN 0 8020 2556 0
• A Little of All These: An Estonian Childhood by Tania Alexander
  Cape, 165 pp, £12.50, March 1987, ISBN 0 224 02400 0

Stuck in the country, bored and vaguely discontented, with themselves, their lives or the way things are, half the heroes in Russian fiction appear to be waiting for something to happen while the other half, in varying degrees of relief or despair, settle down to the thought that nothing will – not in their lifetime. Tolstoy might not have made so much of Levin’s contentment had contentment not been so hard to find. These are large and uneasy generalisations, but it can sometimes seem as if most of what was written in Russia before 1917 was written in the expectation of upheaval.