Lost and Found in Russia

by Richards, Susan

• ISBN13: 9781590513484
• ISBN10: 1590513487
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2010-12-07
• Publisher: Other Press

Summary

After the fall of communism, Russia was in a state of shock. The sudden and dramatic change left many people adrift and uncertain-but also full of a tentative but tenacious hope. Returning again and again to the provincial hinterlands of this rapidly evolving country from 1992 to 2008, Susan Richards struck up some extraordinary friendships with people in the middle of this historical drama. Anna, a questing journalist, struggles to express her passionate spirituality within the rules of the new society. Natasha, a restless spirit, has relocated from Siberia in a bid to escape the demands of her upper-class family and her own mysterious demons. Tatiana and Misha, whose business empire has blossomed from the ashes of the Soviet Union, seem, despite their luxury, uneasy in this new world. Richards watches them grow and change, their fortunes rise and fall, their hopes soar and crash. Through their stories and her own experiences, Susan Richards demonstrates how in Russia, the past and the present cannot be separated. She meets scientists convinced of the existence of UFOs and mind-control warfare. She visits a cult based on working the land and a tiny civilization founded on the practices of traditional Russian Orthodoxy. Gangsters, dreamers, artists, healers, all are wondering in their own ways, "Who are we now if wers"re not communist? What does it mean to be Russian?" This remarkable history of contemporary Russia holds a mirror up to a forgotten people.Lost and Found in Russiais a magical and unforgettable portrait of a society in transition.

Author Biography

Susan Richards is the author of Epics of Everyday Life, which won the PEN/Time
Life Award for Non-Fiction and the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award in 1990. She edits open Democracy Russia, part of open-Democracy, the Web site about global affairs, which she cofounded. After earning a doctorate on Alexander Solzhenitsyn from St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, she initiated the program of talks, conferences, and debates at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and worked as a film producer. With her husband, the television producer Roger Graef, she started Bookaid, a charity that sent a million English-language books to public libraries throughout the Soviet Union.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Map	p. xiii
Time Line	p. xv
1992-1993	p. 1
1992	p. 5
There Be Monsters
Benya's Ark
Visions and Fakes
1993	p. 23
Opening the Cages
False Pregnancy
The Red Cardinal
A-Little-Bit-Me
The Other Side of Despair
Tied Back to Back
Turning Russia Around
Connoisseur of Silences
The Devil's Tune
An Abyss of Stars
A Piece of Green Pumice
Siberian Cassandra
The Art of Mind Control
1994-1996	p. 83
1994	p. 87
Legend of the Golden Woman
The Path Not Taken
The Lost Heart of Russia
Russia's Quakers
In the Wilderness
The Time of the Antichrist
Photography Is a Sin!
Music of the Forest
1995	p. 115
The Dark Side
1996	p. 124
Creeping Fascism
Banging the Table
1997-1998	p. 133
1997	p. 137
In Search of the Russian Idea
The Prodigal Returns
Building Heaven or Hell
Touching the Cosmos
Riding Two Realities
Ticket to the End of the Earth
The Russian Orestes
A Country Going Cold Turkey
The Society of Original Harmony
Eating Children
Singing Cedars?
The Twelve-Step Cure
Music of the Spheres
1998	p. 198
Looking for Mother Olga
The Goddess and Baba Yaga
Lifting Zina's Curse
1999-2004	p. 215
2004	p. 219
Cordelia of the Steppes
Freedom Is Slavery
My Dream House
Theirs Not to Reason Why
One Small Mend in the Past
2005-2007	p. 251
2006	p. 253
Fairy Tale in Dubious Taste
The Two-Plank Bridge
St. Seraphim and the Bomb
The Crooked and the Beautiful
Glimpses of Grace
Finding the Golden Woman
2008	p. 285
How About a Riddle?
The Worm Turns
The Price of Dreams
Pilnyak's Island
Festival of Dead Leaves
Acknowledgments	p. 321
Index	p. 323
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

On my last day in Saratov I had met a young woman who had a flat in Marx. She had invited me to stay there, “in the unlikely event that you ever come back.” Anna was a local journalist and she had championed the cause of a homeland for Russia’s Germans.  We met briefly, in the offices of the city’s only liberal newspaper, where she worked. A tall, gangling young woman, she moved awkwardly, as if her clothes were lined with prickles. Her lively, boyish face was framed by a tonsure of dark hair. She appraised me guardedly from a pair of large brown eyes whose whites were tinged with blue. They sparkled with intelligence. Over meatballs in the paper’s canteen—which poisoned me for a week—she said something intriguing: “I should warn you—do you remember what happened when Gerald Durrell freed the animals in his zoo? He opened their cages and they wouldn’t leave—just sat there and howled. They refused to go back to the jungle and start hunting for food again. Well, that’s us—that’s what we’re like in Marx.” I laughed. But she was not smiling.