A Russian childhood

Press, 24 April 1987, Page 19

A Russian childhood

The House by the Dvina: A Russian Childhood. By Eugenio Fraser. Corgi/Transword, 1986. 336 pp. Illustrations. $12.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Naylor Hillary). In 1903 a young Russian businessman was sent by his family to Dundee, in Scotland, to learn more about the business of exporting timber and flax. He came from Archangel, in the far north of European Russia, a port on the waters of the Arctic, important for the export of furs and timber, but free of ice for only four months of the year. In Scotland he met and married a young Scottish girl, of stern Presbyterian background, and took her home to Archangel. There the author of this book was born in 1905. To read her account of her childhood, before the Russian Revolution of 1917, and in the harsh years immediately afterwards, is to have a sensation of falling backwards in time. As a baby, Eugenie Scholts (as she was then) was cuddled by an elderly Russian nanny who had once seen Napoleon’s Grand Army retreating through Smolensk in 1812. Her own adventures, travelling between Scotland and northern Russia 65 years ago, are both sad and exhilarating. Best of all, however, are her accounts of ordinary life in preCommunist Russia, in a provincial town that might have served as a setting for a Chekhov play. Somehow, amid snow that could last for half the

year, her family built an exotic garden. One uncle, moved by a desire to make religious pilgrimages, vanished on foot for years and returned with a collection of seeds from remotest Siberia. The garden seemed to serve as a symbol of all that was good in Tsarist Russia — gradually, under communism, it decayed into a wilderness. Some of the author’s most valuable recollections concern the intervention of Western countries in support of anti-Communist groups between 1918 and 1920. To Archangel came British and Canadians, French and Americans. When they withdrew Archangel fell for a time into the hands of wandering bands of thieves claiming to be acting in the name of "the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” “Yet in this twilight world of chats, starvation and accumulating horror, all was not tears and sorrow,” she writes. Somehow, the youngsters still managed to enjoy themselves, right up to the time in 1920 when mother and daughter finally escaped by trawler to Norway, and on to her other family home in Dundee. There can be few accounts of childhood, as recalled in very old age, that make more fascinating reading than this one. What happened when a small monkey got loose in the steamy, crowded sauna? Or when greatgrandfather tried to buy a peasant girl for a wife? It is a wonderful, remote, and touching world.