Sashenka is a novel with many qualities, and when judged specifically as a first novel, it is excellent. It’s no surprise that the historical detail is strong, but it is impressive that the author never gets mired in it; Montefiore deploys his historical knowledge as a means to an end, rather than as the end in itself. The characterisation is superb, with Sashenka being especially well drawn. When her battle between the need to be dutiful and the need to be an individual takes place, it is tempting to draw parallels between her and many other tragic female characters in Russian literature, but it is to the author’s credit that we can draw those parallels without marking down his own creation. With her unwanted beauty and charisma, her gentle nobility that transcends class or wealth, and her earnest ideals which eventually cost her so much, Sashenka commands our total sympathy, and when she is forced apart from her children, the sadness is profound and hard to dispel.
The novel loses some quality, however, through its pacing, particularly midway. Montefiore’s prose, at its best, is rich and evocative; at its worst, it slows the story too greatly, and occasionally when the requirements of drama demand that things should keep moving, the story is freighted with unnecessary, scene-setting descriptions of clothing and surroundings. When overused, descriptive language paradoxically starts to take away rather than to add to the mental picture we are building. To describe one smell is useful; to describe endless smells in just a few pages, so that different people are giving off whiffs of cloves and sweat and stale cheese, risks making the reader numb: it becomes an overload of imagery and so we stop responding to it.
However, although less captivating than it could have been with a few cuts, Sashenka is still a powerful novel, erudite and well structured, and with a heroine who lingers in the mind when the story is finished.
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