Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village

by Serge Schmemann

Tracing the lives of his Russian forebears, Serge Schmemann, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times , tells a remarkable story that spans the past two hundred years of Russian history.

First, he draws on a family archive rich in pictorial as well as documentary treasure to bring us into the prerevolutionary life of the village of Sergiyevskoye (now called Koltsovo), where the spacious estate of his mother's family was the seat of a manor house as vast and imposing as a grand hotel.

In this village, on this estate--ringed with orchards, traversed by endless paths through linden groves, overseen by a towering brick church, and bordered by a sparkling-clear river--we live through the cycle of a the springtime mud, summertime card parties, winter nights of music and good talk in a haven safe from the bitter cold and ever-present snow. Family recollections of life a century ago summon up an aura of devotion to tsar and church. The unjust, benevolent, complicated, and ultimately doomed relationship between master and peasants--leading to growing unrest, then to civil war--is subtly captured.

Diary entries record the social breakdown step by grievances going unresolved, the government foundering, the status quo of rural life overcome by revolutionary fervor. Soon we see the estate brutally collectivized, the church torn apart brick by brick, the manor house burned to the ground. Some of the family are killed in the fighting; others escape into exile; one writes to his kin for the last time from the Gulag.

The Soviet era is experienced as a time of privation, suffering, and lost illusions. The Nazi occupation inspires valorous resistance, but at great cost. Eventually all that remains of Sergiyevskoye is an impoverished collective.

Without idealizing the tsarist past or wholly damning the regime that followed, Schmemann searches for a lost heritage as he shows how Communism thwarted aspiration and initiative. Above all, however, his book provides for us a deeply felt evocation of the long-ago life of a corner of Russia that is even now movingly beautiful despite the ravages of history and time.

Genres: History, Russia, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Russian History

350 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Shawn Thrasher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schemann uses the small Russian village from which came his mother's family, the Osorgins, as microcosm of Russian history over the last 200 years. His genealogical and village memoir is sweet, idyllic, poignant, almost idealized, but with cold steel just waiting beneath to slice it all up into pieces. A culture or society may seem to suddenly collapse in revolution or chaos, but Schemann's village society more unravels, like knitting gone bad. Lenin and Stalin only grabbed onto strings that were already loose and pulled hard. Even when the book ends in 1996, the unraveling continues, as urban life consumes the rural young of what is left of the Orsogin's village. I'm curious as to what has happened since then. Beneath the sleighs and snow and vodka, and fur hats and beech trees and wild mushrooms and summer twilight, Russian history is hard, sad stuff.

[April · Rating 5 out of 5]

A series of recent events has prompted me to think back...to my many years of....involvement...in things Russian.
The most notable, and horrible, event, was the murder of a long-ago Russian friend under, shall we say, suspicious circumstances. A few years ago he had the temerity to challenge Putin's telecom minister...and to not back down. He won in court,....but it seems the bad guys won in the end.
This book is bringing back to me many good, and bad, memories of my time living in the Soviet Union, and then Russia. I'll write more soon - but I highly recommend it.

[Juliette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no clue why the Independent chose to summarize this book as: A hymn of praise to pastoral Russia on the cover. The only explanation must be that nobody from the Independent had read it. Echoes of a Native Land is neither “a hymn,” nor “of praise” – in fact, Schmemann writes about tsarist, soviet and post-soviet Russia of the 1990’s with dead realism and deep understanding of their respective complexities.

I highly recommend the book, not only because the author’s family history is interesting in its own right, but also because it presents profound insights into the mentality and politics of Schmemann's original fatherland. He published Echoes of a Native Land in 1997, and already predicted that experimental democracy could not be planted on post-USSR soil with any notion of lasting confidence.

[Peter Corrigan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I long been fascinated by Russia and have read numerous tomes on Russia and the Soviet Union including two of Richard Pipe's comprehensive accounts, 'The Russian Revolution' and 'Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime' and more recently Henri Troyat's wonderful biography of Leo Tolstoy. But this book provided a level of insight and personal involvement that cannot be found in such overviews. The author himself was a partial first-hand witness to a cataclysmic shift in history, the fall of the Soviet Union, but his relatives experienced a far more shattering series of events. It is a very human but deeply disturbing tale that is not often told. Michael Igantieff did something similar with his 'Russian Album' which I read years ago but it was finished before the fall of the USSR and lacks the closing of the circle that you get in 'Echoes'. There is a reason the story is not told often--huge numbers of those who experienced it were liquidated in the Gulag, killed in WW2 or were too traumatized to think about writing something. I've often wondered--can there be any people that have suffered like the Russians? But there are tremendous insights in this book into Russian history, mind and character and it is very rewarding for the interested reader, but also pretty depressing when you look at all the horror and where it ended up today. There seems to be something so fatalistic in the Russian mentality that it is hard to fathom. Mr. Schememann touches on some of the reasons and his insights are interesting yet not in great depth, but with reason, that would be take another giant book. It goes back to the creation of the serf state and the building of an empire on a scale that still defies belief and form of government that has often crushed the individual As a final observation, I do note with some pleasure the author's acknowledgement in the very last footnote of the book of Ronald Reagan's important role in the fall of the USSR with his 'Evil Empire' statement and the very idea of 'Star Wars'. Huge praise coming from a guy writing for the New York Times, although perhaps the Times of 1997 had not fallen quite so deeply into it's unilateral alliance with the Left. Yet I'm sure you could find plenty of NYT editorials in the 80s excoriating Reagan on his Soviet stance.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely readable social/cultural history of Russia beginning at the time of tsarist rule in late 19th century and ending with perestroika and the Russian-mafia rule of today. After reading this book, I have a much deeper awareness of the events and ideas that shaped the Russian people.

The author brought the people of the village of Koltsovo to life with vivid written portraits of his ancestors, as well as the peasant villagers and their families. Clearly, the author spent an enormous amount of time and effort in entering these people's lives and hearing their stories not only with a journalist's sense of objectivity, but also a human sense of empathy and compassion.

[Laura Edwards · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting idea, but the writing was just all over the place and I couldn't finish. The author throws out names not mentioned before as if the reader should know who the person is without explanation. Also, I ran across an historical inaccuracy. The author states that during WWII "the men fought at the front and the women labored in the rear". It is common knowledge to anyone with even a passing interest in Russian history that a significant number of Russian women fought and died in WWII and there are plenty of books on this very topic.

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book by a journalist researching the history of the Russian estate his ancestors fled after the Soviet revolution. He won a Pulitzer for covering the fall of the Berlin Wall. He weaves in anecdotes about his experiences as a reporter in Soviet times, and the experiences of Russian people of every class living under Soviet rule.

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schmemann uses the history of his family's estate in Russia to trace the history of the last approximately 200 years, and does so very well. He brings the stories to life. Excellent read.

[M.K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a bit of a Russophile. The largest nation in the world fascinates me with its contradictions: palaces plated with gold and izbas without running water, scientific breakthroughs matched with a general disparagement of education, great bursts of furious enthusiasm dragged down by bouts of melancholy. All of its complications are captured in this account of the author's ancestral lands south of Moscow. Descended from Russian gentry, Serge Schmemann sought to uncover through the written accounts of his ancestors and the general known history how this corner of Russia was a microcosm for the forces that operated in Russia at large from the tsarist days to revolutionary Russia, Stalinist times and the downfall of the Soviet Union and the turbulent decades that followed. Published nearly twenty years ago, the book provides the necessary sensitivity to understand how fragile Russia's emergence from a totalitarian regime still remains.

I soaked up the tiny details of early life on the estate, since my work-in-progress is set in early 19th century rural Russia. The serf children caught picking mushrooms in the linden grove by the mistress of the manor house. The frustrated railings of the English colonel, Kar, as he attempted to introduce four-field rotation to the entrenched 3-field model of stubborn Russian peasants.

The bulk of the story lies outside my timeline but I burrowed into it, anyway. There was valor and sacrifice, pettiness and thievery, cunning and progressiveness, sullenness and sabotage. He was honest about his relatives, and in so doing gave them dignity as fully realized human beings. Most poignant was the tale of the author's grand-uncle, Georgy Osorgin. He was killed by the revolutionary insurgents, his death hastened by his own dumb bravado, but he writes a final letter to his uncle filled with an outpouring of longing for his childhood rural village life with its round of field work and church music. As bells pealed outside his prison, bells that would soon be silenced to be only restarted for a short time during WWII when Stalin saw value in rallying people around a spiritual centre, Georgy transported himself back to a time of simple goodness and clarity of purpose.

In a way, I think that the modern Russian might be doing the same thing. I was a Western-watching witness to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in my lifetime a generation of Russians has arisen, free from direct totalitarianism. I currently follow the v-logs of Natasha from eastern Russia. Twenty and a university student, pretty and pink-haired, she speaks in good English about everyday life in her part of Russia. She was asked why Russians don't smile, something that she hadn't noticed until it was pointed out to her. Now I know that during Stalinist times, when two out of every five people were informers, no one trusted each other. Subsequent dictators didn't exactly inspire openness either. But it struck me as both naïve and heartening when she wondered that herself and proposed that Russians should smile more. Maybe now, maybe, they have more to smile about.

Writerly bits There's something to be said for reading ahead of the period you're writing in. It means you can go back to your period and add parts that resonate outward to the reader. In my story, if revolutionaries attempt to overthrow the tsar, another character can point out the likely ramifications--chaos and more despotism--that the reader knows for a fact was the outcome. But isn't a period of chaos necessary for new and necessary growth as we can also see in modern Russia? The fictional dilemma takes on the drama of the historical truth.

[Witoldzio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clearly, this book is a labor of love, a masterpiece, a Herculean task that resulted in an impressive achievement. I was surprised by the availability of documents, photos, memoirs etc., although, of course, I am aware it took years of work to find them. But it seems that, unlike much of Eastern Europe, the destruction of WWII has not reached in Russia beyond a certain geographical line.The book talks about topics that are little known to the broader Western audience. The West doesn't understand Russia and Russia doesn't understand herself. Even the author doesn't understand Russia. The country is as fascinating and beautiful as it is frightening.
A quick side note - I found one small mistake that copy editors should have corrected - the Cracovienne is definitely NOT a Hungarian dance.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well done. Interesting to see how the sweep of Russian history affected one village. I am surprised how many records the Communists kept about former times, and how detailed the memoirs of Schmemann's grandfather are. The more I read about Russia, the more I believe I will never really understand it, but this book helps.

[chris baxter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read. Read this while reading a Russian Revolution book and this book really helped you see the effects the Revolution had on the way of life of regular people through their own words. Really helps you understand better what the results were.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. Weaves back and forth in history, but in a way that works and makes sense. I enjoyed the journalistic aspect of him collecting stories for the book as well, and how Schmemann wove it all together.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read the first half. The narrative seems too journalistic to me - a lot of citations and weaving in narratives from multiple people feel repetitive at times.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It's always interesting, with a nice mix of modern-day commentary and historical description. It's told primarily from the point of view of the estate's various owners, the latest of which is an ancestor of the author. You'll see what life was like for the landed gentry (and to a lesser extent the peasant population) during the time of the tsar, and then the revolution and Communism (hint: life got worse for everyone). Politics loom large, of course, but the descriptions of regular life (religon, growing seasons and festivals, and so on) are equally ineresting, and provide a nice insight into the character of the Russian people. Highly recommended for Russia-phobes.

[James Jeffrey]

Son of a Russian Orthodox Arch-Priest, New York Times editor, he has written a thought provoking damnation of the Russian Revolution. It appears that it was the children of priest who so quickly embraced the ideals of a Godless state.

[Mills College Library]

947.26 S3479 1997