Born in 1908, Nikolay Andreyev came from a middle-class family in provincial Russia. His father and mother were both school teachers. His mother had many jewels but never wore them in public, since she believed a teacher should not show herself to be concerned with such fripperies. His parents’ views were those of the liberal intelligentsia. An uncle was killed by the police during a demonstration in the revolutionary year of 1906. Only his nanny was a monarchist, howling, ‘Woe unto you all, woe’ when she heard of the Tsar’s abdication. Nikolay’s mother banished her instantly to her room for spoiling the family’s celebrations. Later, amidst civil war and Bolshevik terror, Nikolay’s father was heard to mutter that ‘when the Emperor abdicated the only person in our room with any sense was Nanny’.
After months of hunger, danger and uncertainty Nikolay’s family fled over the Estonian border in the winter of 1919 in the wake of Yudenich’s retreating White army. His seven-year-old sister, Tanya, died of influenza and hunger during their flight. For the first time in his life Nikolay saw his father cry, devastated by helplessness to save his child. ‘He was powerless to help . . . he had lost his social status, his material security, his national self- assurance, the strength of his convictions.’
In time his father acquired a job as a junior engineer in Tallinn on the basis of his initial training before he switched to being a teacher. Nikolay himself attended the Russian High School there and was a star pupil. On graduation, the best boy and girl at the Russian school, together with their peers at all the Estonian high schools, were presented to the President of the new Estonian Republic: ‘The president spoke with feeling and expression, which was not common in Estonian everyday life.’ The two communities, Russian and Estonian, lived peacefully together, but with little intermingling or real sympathy. Nikolay’s family and school milieu were entirely Russian, and for a boy like him, already passionately concerned with Russian literature and culture, there was no future in little Estonia.
So in 1927 Nikolay left for a higher education in Prague, one of the great centres of the émigré Russian intelligentsia. He remained there until arrested by the Soviet occupation forces in 1945, becoming a considerable figure in the Russian academic community. Most political tendencies in the emigration were represented in Prague. Then, as in the 1990s, Eurasianism made a great appeal to some Russian intellectuals, who felt humiliated in European exile and sought to understand why the Russian people in 1917-21 had rejected the country’s westernised elites.
Nikolay’s account of personalities, politics and cultural life among the Russian émigrés in Prague is fascinating, funny and tragic — the latter above all because for such people occupation first by the Nazis and then by the Soviet security police meant danger, sometimes betrayal and often death. For none of these Russians was fate more tragic than for the soldiers of Vlasov, mostly former Soviet POWs who helped to save the Prague uprising against the Germans in 1945 and then — if they were lucky — endured many years in Soviet labour camps.
Nikolay Andreyev himself was arrested in 1945, as were virtually all even remotely prominent members of the Russian emigration in Czechoslovakia. Unusually, though imprisoned for many months, he was finally released without being charged with any crime, and found his way to Cambridge university in 1948, where he spent the rest of his career as a l;ecturer, until he died in 1982.
Cambridge and England were a much wider world than Estonia but even so this was an alien and parochial society for a man of Andreyev’s culture and deep commitment to Russia’s future. His memoirs actually end with his arrival in England, which perhaps allows him to avoid making some rather telling comments about the world of Russian studies in his new university home. Even without this, however, this rich and moving account of the life of a deeply humane and intelligent man will fascinate anyone interested in all that was best about the world of the Russian emigration.
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