Exclusive interview with author Vanora Bennett and a review of her new novel about a Jewish girl living with violin-makers in Russia during the Communist revolution
Rating: Three Stars
“Midnight in St Petersburg is about a Jewish girl struggling to overcome the brutal prejudice and violence against Jews in Imperial Russia,” says Midnight in St Petersburg author Vanora Bennett. “No sooner has Inna escaped to the relative safety of the capital and found her feet, than the 1917 Revolution comes and sweeps not just her but all her new-found friends away into a different and still more dangerous kind of chaos. Odd though it might sound, a lot of this story comes straight from my own personal experience.”
In pre-revolutionary Russia there was a big separation between rich and poor. The Jews suffered regular pogroms and persecution and lived a precarious existence. The background of the revolutionary war is a great backdrop, but it is almost too much for this story. As the story unfolds from 1911 to 1919 There is romance, history and the struggles of the lower class. We feel and understand the fears and hopes of Inna, but she lacks empathy for those around her.
We meet Inna Feldman in 1911 St. Petersburg, soon after she has fled Kiev after she loses her family. She lives with the Leman family, distant relatives who take her in and teach her how to make priceless violins. She’s attracted to her bad-boy cousin Yasha, who is enthralled with the idea of revolution. A better friend may be the older Englishman Horace Wallick, who works for Fabergé. She crosses paths with Rasputin. It’s the assassination of the famed peasant mystic that touches off the revolution. When Inna is asked to repair a priceless Stradivarius violin she sees an opportunity to escape.
While living in Russia after the collapse of Communism, Bennett discovered an unexpected ancestor who’d spent the ten years before Communism living in St Petersburg. “He was an English and Jewish great-great uncle who had worked at Fabergé, the jewelers, painting miniature scenes on miniature jeweled boxes. So part of the idea of the story was to re-imagine his life. And if possible, to give him a happier ending.”
“The idea of writing about a Jewish girl struggling against anti-Semitic prejudice, which was intense at the time I set my story…on the eve of the Revolution…was a way of writing about the ‘corrosiveness’ of prejudice,” says Bennett. “This was something I saw a lot of while living in Russia, all those years later, though the people being picked on had changed”
Bennett studied Russian at Oxford and then went to work as a correspondent for Reuters news agency in Moscow, just as the Soviet Union collapsed. She spent the next seven years working in Russia, the last two of them as staff correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. She’s written two non-fiction books about Russia, Crying Wolf: the Return of War to Chechnya and The Taste of Dreams: An Obsession with Russia and Caviar. Taste is a travelogue about the illegal post-Soviet caviar trade and the power of greed. She has written four historical novels set in England in Tudor times and before, starting with Portrait of an Unknown Woman, about Sir Thomas More, his family, and a portrait by Hans Holbein.
Like her book’s heroine Inna, Bennett was raised in a family of musicians and learned the violin. Bennett learned how to make a violin, from a few blocks of wood to a polished strung instrument that makes a beautiful sound. “This is one of the most interesting things I have ever done,” says Bennett. “I love the beautiful instrument I made. I now play it in a London group playing Balkan and gypsy music.”
Bennett works from a tiny office in a creative co-op. “Full of arty carpenters and film directors and cartoonists, in north London,” says Bennett. “My small corner is absolutely piled with books about Russia.”
Midnight in St. Petersburg: A Novel by Vanora Bennett. Hardcover: 384 pages Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (January 19, 2016), Language: English. ISBN-13: 978-1250079435 $25.99
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