Charlotte Hobson

Thursday

9 Jan 2020
Charlotte Hobson

The dark side of Venus — goddess of war as well as love

Bettany Hughes has spent a decade, she tells us, exploring the origins of the goddess Aphrodite, first for a BBC documentary aired in 2017 and now for this book. I think it’s fair to say that if you saw the documentary, the book won’t have much more to offer you. If not it’s an intriguing tale that tracks the gorgeous and omnipresent Venus of western civilisation back 6,000 years to a series of strange little knobbly figures with penis-heads and emphasised vulvas found on Cyprus, presumably connected with a fertility cult. In the fourth millennium BC, a fearsome trio of goddesses swept into Bronze Age Cyprus from Mesopotamia. Innanna, described in a poem written c. 2350 BC ‘of blazing dominion/clad in dread/riding on fire-red power’ was worshipped in 180 sanctuaries in Babylon alone, while Ishtar  was immortalised as ‘she who vanquishes all’; Astarte, riding in the bows of a Phoenician boat, encapsulated war, death and destruction as well as life and sex.

Thursday

18 Jul 2019
Charlotte Hobson

Distant voices, shattered lives

In 1990s Russia, war veterans were a bossy, even aggressive presence, upbraiding people in shops and pushing to the front in the trolleybus queue. Complaining about this at some point, I was struck and shamed by a Russian friend’s reaction: ‘Oh, but it’s sad... Imagine how hard their lives have been, to make them like that.’ Last Witnesses consists of about 100 accounts by men and women who were children when the Nazis invaded. Without preface or context of any kind, their voices rise off the page — hesitant, desperate, terrified, matter of fact, poetic, bewildered. Their ellipses are loud with choked tears and still-raw fear. All we are told is the speaker’s name, age in 1941, and occupation when he or she talked to Alexievich; many admit that this is the first time they have spoken of these horrors, or even thought of them, since the war: ‘Today my soul won’t be still all day and all night.

Distant voices, shattered lives

Thursday

10 Jan 2019
Charlotte Hobson

Little shots of sedition

In this handsomely illustrated book Tobie Mathew makes a case for the lowly postcard’s role in the politicisation of pre-revolutionary Russia. Cheap to produce, easily transported and hidden, and conveying a simple graphic message, picture postcards were ideally suited to anti-government agitation. Too dangerous to post, these little shots of sedition were preserved and shared for years in the postcard albums that were a feature of any polite drawing-room and increasing numbers of peasant huts and workers’ barracks. Before 1905 revolutionary groups printed postcards abroad and smuggled them into the country, simultaneously spreading their message and raising funds. The Russo-Japanese war provided good material for satirical images, yet in those days the number of active revolutionaries was minute —perhaps a few thousand in a country of 125 million — and the vast majority of Russians were unthinkingly loyal.

Little shots of sedition

Thursday

19 Jul 2018
Charlotte Hobson

‘T’ is for Trotskyite

Varlam Shalamov’s short stories of life in the Soviet Gulag leave an impression of ice-sharp precision, vividness and lucidity, as though the world is being viewed through a high-resolution lens. His subject matter, as well as his complete lack of sentimentality, means that much of what is brought into focus is horrifying or pitiful. Yet his capacity to capture and distil the experience, moment by moment, has an exhilarating effect, like that of the frozen bilberries he picked in the depths of the Siberian winter: ‘bright blue, wrinkled like empty leather purses, containing a dark, bluish-black juice… I ate the berries myself, my tongue carefully and eagerly pressing each one to my palate. The sweet, aromatic juice of each squashed berry intoxicated me for a second.

‘T’ is for Trotskyite

Thursday

21 Jun 2018
Charlotte Hobson

The dark side of the circus

In 2013 Tessa Fontaine joined up with the World of Wonders, a circus sideshow that travels around the United States each year displaying sword-swallowers, human-headed spiders, snake-charmers and fire-eaters to a marvelling/cynical public. Sideshows, as Fontaine writes, ‘are where people come to see public displays of their private fears’, and to probe their disgust reflexes and their yearnings. Here, too, they come to tread the line between relinquishing themselves to magic and uncovering, once and for all, the trick. Yet as Fontaine discovers in her first flame-eating lesson, the trick is simply that there is no trick. Flame-eaters get burnt; sword-swallowers die of wounds inflicted by carelessly inserted blades.

The dark side of the circus

Thursday

3 May 2018
Charlotte Hobson

A brutal band of thieves

Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more than timely. In these days of ever more bizarre Russian attacks, it reads like the essential companion to a bewildering and aggressive new world, a world that is no longer confined behind Russian borders but seeks actively to penetrate and disrupt our own society. Essentially a history of the development of Russia’s unique form of organised crime, it constantly illuminates and clarifies the familiar, legal narrative of Russian history and the attitudes of Putin’s clique. The Russian mafia’s distinctive culture originally emerged during the years of revolution and civil war. The collapse of the state created a vacuum for brutal criminal gangs that operated according to their own rules of honour, with their own hierarchy, language and agreements.

A brutal band of thieves

Thursday

8 Jun 2017
Charlotte Hobson

First signs of thaw

The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956 passed off entirely without incident. Speeches on the next five-year plan were applauded and Stalin’s pet agronomist Lysenko made his customary appearance to denounce bourgeois genetics. A visiting communist from Trieste, Vittorio Vidali, noted his envy of two Uzbek party members who sat reading short stories throughout the proceedings. By late on Friday, the Congress was over, except for the announcement of one additional closed session the following morning. How many delegates skipped this dreary-sounding extra session? Any that did missed the single pivotal moment in the history of the Soviet Union. Without preamble, Nikita Khrushchev stood up and delivered a report ‘On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences’.

First signs of thaw

Thursday

8 Sep 2016
Charlotte Hobson

Exit the Tsar

Helen Rappaport’s new book makes no claim to be a complete account of the Russian revolution. Instead it presents a highly readable and fluent description of the events of 1917 in the capital, Petrograd, as experienced by the city’s many foreign residents. Russia’s booming prewar economy had attracted every sort of business person and technical expert, as well as diplomats, journalists, adventurers and fleets of governesses. Their first-hand revolutionary experiences were too extraordinary not to record, and those who did not write contemporaneous accounts often produced memoirs later. Rappaport has unearthed striking new material from archives in Russia, the US, France and at the University of Leeds. From the start of the year everyone from ambassadors to actresses seems to have been struck by the atmosphere in the city, ‘taut as a wire’.

Exit the Tsar

Thursday

5 May 2016
Charlotte Hobson

All is not lost | 5 May 2016

Marina Lewycka’s latest happy-go-lucky tale of migrant folk in Britain takes a remark by the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin as its epigraph: ‘Nothing is too good for ordinary people.’ In the vertical community within one of Lubetkin’s postwar blocks of flats in East London we meet hapless Bertie, resting actor caught on the hop by the spare-bedroom tax; disabled Len, thinking positive about his benefit reassessment; Violet, dreaming of her childhood in Kenya at her desk in a City insurance firm; and many more — some powering ahead in our new age of golden job opportunities and zero-hour contracts, others not so much. In fact, after his mother’s death, Bertie decides the only way he’s going to avoid homelessness is to find himself a mother-impersonator.

All is not lost | 5 May 2016

Friday

5 Jun 2015
Charlotte Hobson

We had so many books we had to hire a structural engineer to prevent us being buried

My father Anthony Hobson, whose books are to be sold at Christie’s in two sales next week, claimed that the book collector’s greatest joy was the sight of an empty shelf: a vacuum begging to be filled. Such a thing was a rare occurrence in our home, so freighted with literary matter, mainly upstairs, that the advice of a structural engineer had to be sought: were we all about to be buried beneath an avalanche of bibliographical rarities? On the landing stood the vast tomes on Renaissance book binding, my father’s lifelong study - serried dark objects stamped with words that sounded to my young self like spells: Sigismondo Boldoni, Aldus Manutius. But in the library itself, where my father used to read us bedtime stories, the large glass-fronted cases were filled with his friends.

We had so many books we had to hire a structural engineer to prevent us being buried

Thursday

21 May 2015
Charlotte Hobson

Micro-managing the terror

‘Lately, the paradoxical turns of recent Russian history… have given my research more than scholarly relevance,’ remarks Oleg Khlevniuk in his introduction. Indeed, in Putin’s Russia Stalin’s apologists and admirers seem daily to become more vocal. The language of the 1930s is used in televised tirades against ‘internal enemies’ and ‘foreign agents’. Stalin himself is upheld not only as a strong leader, but also as an ‘effective manager’ who, despite his mistakes, did what was necessary to modernise the Soviet Union; or, contrarily, as a benevolent dictator who was unaware of the corrupt actions of his officials. In short, there could hardly be a more opportune moment for the publication of this authoritative, fluently written, concise life, the pinnacle of current scholarship on its subject.

Micro-managing the terror

Thursday

9 Apr 2015
Charlotte Hobson

Attack of the night witches

The name Lyuba Vinogradova may not ring any bells, but her ferrety eye for spotting a telling detail may already have impressed you. As Antony Beevor generously acknowledges in his introduction to this book, her work as his researcher in various archives played an important role in the creation of his triumphant Russian histories; she has also assisted Simon Sebag Montefiore and Max Hastings, among others. Here she brings to light the fascinating story of the world’s first and only all-female aviation regiments. As German troops advanced towards Moscow in 1941, the celebrated aviatrix Marina Raskova determined to form three ‘women’s regiments’: fighters, night bombers and long-distance bombers. The glamorous Raskova was a heroine in the USSR following a record-breaking flight that crashed in the Siberian taiga, leaving her to survive for ten days on a single bar of chocolate.

Attack of the night witches

Thursday

19 Mar 2015
Charlotte Hobson

Life after Vera: Patrick Gale’s hero finds happiness towards the end of the Saskatchewan line

Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry Cane spent the first part of his life as a gentleman of leisure among the Edwardian comforts of Twickenham. What then suddenly prompted him to abandon his wife and small daughter and emigrate to the Canadian wilderness? The official line was that he had money troubles, yet he doesn’t seem to have been short of cash in Canada. As far as we know, Harry Cane’s motives went with him to the grave. In this re- imagining of his life, however — partly because homosexual love is a theme throughout Patrick Gale’s work — it feels entirely convincing that his secret should be ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.

Life after Vera: Patrick Gale’s hero finds happiness towards the end of the Saskatchewan line

Thursday

12 Feb 2015
Charlotte Hobson

How Putin turned Russian politics into reality TV

‘We all know there will be no real politics.’ A prominent Russian TV presenter is speaking off the record at a production meeting in 2001. ‘But we still have to give our viewers the sense that something is happening. They need to be kept entertained. Politics has got to feel … like a movie!’ When Peter Pomerantsev, a Brit of Russian descent, sat in on this meeting he had recently graduated and moved to Moscow to work as a TV producer. A decade in Russian television has now provided him with the material for his chilling first book. Nothing is True… is more than an evocative travelogue or an insight into a new system of authoritarian control, although it is both of these. It’s also a hammer to the glass, an alarm rung out across the liberal world.

How Putin turned Russian politics into reality TV

Thursday

10 Oct 2013
Charlotte Hobson

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, by Anya von Bremzen - review

The early 1990s in Russia were hungry years. At the time, I was a student, too idle to barter and hustle for food, and the collapse of the planned economy had left the shops empty. Instead, we staved off hunger- pangs with cigarettes, and if edible matter came our way, we fell upon it like locusts. More often than not, it took the form of the Soviet staple, Salat Olivier — Russian salad, plastered so thickly with mayonnaise that the ingredients were unidentifiable. (I notice that even the act of typing these words makes my mouth water; a complicated rush of nostalgia, anxiety and greed.) Like most aspects of late Soviet Russia, the Salat Olivier had a dual identity. In canteens it had a public life, monotonous and shot through with suspicion — it seemed probable that the mayo disguised unpleasant secrets.

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, by Anya von Bremzen - review

Saturday

17 Mar 2012
Charlotte Hobson

Joy to the world

Patrick Gale’s new novel could be read as a companion work to his hugely successful Notes from an Exhibition, and in fact, in a satisfying twist, some characters and even objects slip from the latter into this novel. Notes from an Exhibition centred around the character of Rachel Kelly, whose mental instability and solipsistic devotion to her art left a painful mark on her family. The ‘perfectly good man’ of this title is a vicar, Barnaby Johnson, as kind, gentle and balanced as Rachel Kelly was not, yet with the same sense of vocation — in this case, selfless service to the church — that moulds and in its own way scars his family. ‘Ah,’ says his daughter Carrie to another child of a ‘very good man’, ‘you have my deepest sympathy.

Saturday

7 May 2011
Charlotte Hobson

The Russian connection

It’s impossible not to warm to the author of this book, a perky Turkish-American woman with a fascination with Russian literature and an irresistible comic touch.It’s impossible not to warm to the author of this book, a perky Turkish-American woman with a fascination with Russian literature and an irresistible comic touch. I began it on the train; barely had I started before my involuntary yelps of hilarity were causing alarm amongst my fellow passengers. An elderly man moved to another seat after I came upon Batuman’s description of the time she found herself judging an adolescent boys’ leg contest in Hungary. Fortunately, perhaps, I arrived at my station before Batuman embarked on an account of an excruciatingly funny literary seminar to rival Lucky Jim.

The Russian connection

Saturday

22 Jan 2011
Charlotte Hobson

The sweet smell of danger

If this novel is ever published with a scratch-and-sniff cover — which incidentally, I think it might be successful enough to warrant — this is what it would smell of: cheap petrol, lust, the ripe, acidic scent of decaying corpse, cat litter, $2,000 suits, Cristal champagne, decaying encyclopaedia, corruption, fumes from the power plant, betrayal, sausage.If this novel is ever published with a scratch-and-sniff cover — which incidentally, I think it might be successful enough to warrant — this is what it would smell of: cheap petrol, lust, the ripe, acidic scent of decaying corpse, cat litter, $2,000 suits, Cristal champagne, decaying encyclopaedia, corruption, fumes from the power plant, betrayal, sausage.In short, a heady noseful of Moscow, an intoxicating perfume that will whirl you off your feet and set your moral compass spinning.

Saturday

23 Oct 2010
Charlotte Hobson

Out of time and place

The misleadingly titled Life of an Unknown Man is in fact the story of two men, and the dualities that their characters embody — fame and anonymity, unhappiness and happiness, West and East.The misleadingly titled Life of an Unknown Man is in fact the story of two men, and the dualities that their characters embody — fame and anonymity, unhappiness and happiness, West and East. Like Andrei Makine himself, the protagonist, Shutov, is a middle-aged Russian emigré author living in Paris. His powers, both sexual and literary, are slipping away from him, and his sense of failure is minutely and rather brilliantly dissected in a parade of petty humiliations, ridiculous outbursts and painful internal dialogue. Orphaned as a child and lonely in emigration, ‘for a long time Shutov had lived in the company of the faithful ghosts that are the creatures brought into being by writers’.

Saturday

4 Sep 2010
Charlotte Hobson

The motherland’s tight embrace

At nursery school, along with her warm milk, little Lena Gorokhova imbibed the essence of survival in the post-war Soviet Union. It consisted of a game called vranyo — pretence: My parents play it at work, and my older sister Marina plays it at school. We all pretend to do something, and those that watch us pretend they are seriously watching us and don’t know that we are only pretending. The school teachers pretended that their pupils’ 100 per cent attendance at Young Pioneer meetings was unconnected with the padlocked door of the meeting hall. The women standing in line pretended they saw no contradiction between reports of record harvests and empty shops, or glittering construction projects and shoddy, just-built university dorms.

The motherland’s tight embrace

Saturday

28 Jun 2008
Charlotte Hobson

Variations on an enigma

You may have caught Jonathan Dimbleby on television recently travelling across Russia, picking potatoes with doughty Russian women, baring all for a steam bath in Moscow, looking alarmed as a white witch from Karelia promised to heal his bad back with a breadknife, etc. Here is the book of the series, in which Dimbleby, drawing on Churchill, plans to ‘reveal the enigma, unwrap the mystery and solve the riddle’ that is Russia.What is it about Russia that inspires this desire, again and again, in Western Europeans? Why does it matter to us? There are other countries that play influential roles in world politics, that ‘straddle the East and West’ as Russia is supposed to do, and books devoted to them too, of course; but nowhere seems to draw the interested amateur in quite such numbers as Russia.

Saturday

17 Feb 2007
Charlotte Hobson

A genius for living

Perhaps the only drawback to this highly enjoyable biography is the shadow of utter banality that it throws over one’s own life by comparison. Princess Sofka Dolgorouky, the author’s grandmother and namesake, began life as scion of one of the great ruling families of Russia and a playmate of the Tsarevich. She was brought up by her grandmother, a figure reminiscent of the Countess in Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades who did not know how to dress herself. Her mother, meanwhile, astonished Petersburg society by becoming a surgeon, flying her own plane, and receiving not one but two Crosses of St George for her bravery as a doctor during the first world war; her father occasioned less surprise but no less scandal by marrying his gypsy mistress.

Saturday

15 Apr 2006
Charlotte Hobson

The heart and stomach of a king

When Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst arrived at the Russian court in 1744, one of the many daughters of minor German royal houses who came to St Petersburg in the hope of an advantageous marriage, she was just 15 and ‘as ugly as a scarecrow’ after a severe illness. Her future husband, the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Peter, was a bizarre character whose main interests were his toy soldiers and ‘romping’ with his valets. No one, unsurprisingly, recognised in her the future Catherine II, one of Russia’s greatest rulers, who was to preside over a vast expansion of Russian territory, the flourishing of St Petersburg, the huge collection of European art and sculpture that formed the basis of the Hermitage, the reform of local government, law and education, not to mention a procession of ever younger and more delectable lovers.

Saturday

24 Sep 2005
Charlotte Hobson

A cross-cultural crisis

If you were a Martian, whiling away the time on an intergalactic beach holiday by reading an account of the Cuban missile crisis, you could be forgiven for dismissing it as wildly implausible fiction. All the blockbuster ingredients are there: the clash of superpowers, one led by the clean-cut American hero, the other by the fat Ukrainian with bad teeth, the military hardware amassing in the Caribbean (nice location), the split-second timing, not to mention the prospect of the end of the world. As a setting for a novel it’s worthy of a Robert Harris-style humdinger, called, no doubt, Cuba, or Missile, or even just Crisis. Instead, rather surprisingly, here we find Katherine Bucknell taking up the challenge in this novel set in Moscow, October 1962.

Saturday

5 Mar 2005
Charlotte Hobson

A tale of January and May

So you’d like your child to be a successful writer (as the classified ads might say)? Well, the least you can do, in that case, is to ensure that he or she grows up as a first- or second-generation immigrant. That way, you will provide them with an incomparably rich (literarily speaking) background straddled between two cultures, with all the sense of irony, alienation and identity crisis this entails. They will absorb two different languages and, even better, the mish-mash of both which inevitably ends up being spoken at home and which has enlivened Anglophone literature in a hundred different ways over the past half century. And, as you will probably have been thoughtful enough to provide them with some fairly alarming experience of flight, or at least some tragic family secrets, they will approach their subject — as Marina Lewycka does in this delightful first novel — with an understanding of history, a profundity, and yet a lightness of touch, that are a joy.

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