Russia Revisited

FROSSIA -- E. M. Almedingen -- Harcourt Brace ($2.50).

Edith Almedingen was born in St. Petersburg 46 years ago. Her autobiography, Tomorrow Will Come, was a slight, delicate and frightening record of her first 24 years. It began with a poetic evocation of St. Petersburg, ended with her escape to Italy--a steppingstone to her home in England, where she landed in 1923, "tired, ill, and more than uncertain of the future."

Frossia is the story of a girl who remained. A Russian chronicle of 358 pages, it is a documentary novel as solid and as solemn as a collection of social workers' case histories, formless, agonized, repetitious, linked only by the personality of Frossia, who in turn is kept going by her faith in a Russia that survives revolutions, the Tcheka, the Comintern, and remains the same.

When Frossia returned to Petrograd after the revolution, she found the city of her girlhood a graveyard. On her first night there she stumbled through the snow to the shattered summerhouse in the ruins of her family home. "Cautiously she made her way to the summerhouse, found the door and sank to the floor, pulling the sack off her shoulders and fumbling for a match. The pale yellow bud of the flame gave her the tiny refuge, rich in cobwebs and dust. A sodden, half-rotted rug still lay across a low marble bench. Overhead the roof caved in rather drunkenly. 'But it is a roof,' Frossia said, pushed the bolt in the small door, supped off a sour milk tart and a hard-boiled egg, got a rug and some shawls out of the sack, snuffed out the candle and slept; a vagabond come back within her own gates."

Refuge. The Parnikovs, a couple of papier-mache old guard aristocrats, took her in. They turned against her when she visited their daughter Lilian, a long-nosed, ugly, attractive whore who lived with a killer for the secret police. "He is dreadful," said the old people. "He wears a shamelessly new leather coat, lives in scandalous plenty--she told me they even had meat and wine and sugar, and he shoots people by the dozen. They have no home life.. . ."

Retreat. Frossia found a job. She typed documents about transgressors of the new economic decrees: speculators in food, currency, timber, building material, raw chemicals, leather, steel, the theft of a sockful of rough amethysts in the Urals, the theft of 500 Ib. of raw glycerine. Her superiors lectured her: "The Party aims have been well defined by Comrade Bukharin. . . ." But she could not understand them. "Imperial or Soviet, she thought, we Russians will never change." Anna von Packen said, "Working for them? How can you? . . . You will not stand aloof from them. Therefore you are helping their ghastly revolution."

Reality. Soon Frossia had a lover. She found Michael on a park bench, weeping, starving, bareheaded, bitter, 22 years old, three years younger than herself. She fed him. "He had fed stooping over the food on the bench, eating very much in the manner of a ravenous animal. . . . Now he lifted his head, and Frossia saw a face as flawlessly chiseled as any she had ever imagined, skin and muscle clothing perfect bone work of chin, cheek and forehead. The straight thin nose, the large sherry-colored eyes ... all suggested breeding. Yet the mouth hung loosely, the eyes were twin pools of despair, and now that they were looking at her, something like a sneer crept into them. . . ."

When he slept Frossia watched him helplessly. "She stood, observing the grimy sunken cheeks, the matted hair, the black-rimmed nails, the bony, bared chest. She got hold of one emaciated hand, brought her ear closer to his face, called his name, but he did not hear her. His blackened mouth continued moving. She bent down and heard a child's broken, muted patter--the young man on Anna's sofa was back in the nursery, afraid of dark corners and curtained windows, and, listening, Frossia was ashamed of her earlier hardness. ..."

Michael's end was sudden. He drifted away from Frossia, landed in a house of prostitution. When the police raided it soon after, Michael saw the procuress watching him steadily, "her heavily lidded eyes strangely noncommittal. It was early in the morning. She stood there in a light shawl and her dressing gown. . . ." She said, "Listen, there is very little food. . . . little room also. So many houses have been burnt down. There is little room for reptiles. The Zoological Gardens were closed down a long time ago. . . ."

Said Michael: "Why are you talking about the Zoological Gardens? Why all these words about reptiles?"

"I am not talking about reptiles. . . . I am talking to one of them. . . ." "Slowly, quietly, she got up and came towards Michael . . . stopped in front of him, a small black revolver gleamed in her steady podgy hand, and swiftly, neatly, she shot him."

Frossia never establishes its heroine's conviction that Russia does not change. But in its long, discursive chapters lit with sudden clear characterizations, it does prove that Russian novels do not change very much.

The Author. When Edith Almedingen was ten, she talked to Leo Tolstoy about Homer. So, at least, her kinspeople told her. Tolstoy thought she might become a poet. Her father was a scientist. She had Danish and English grandparents, grown brothers and sisters. Her family was poor, "though we still kept four domestics." They lived in a flat on one of the Lines of the Vassily Island in St. Petersburg. (The Lines were laid out as canals, but built into wide, tree-shaded boulevards.) Her parents were separated; her father taught at the fashionable Xenia, school for daughters of the nobility.

By the time Edith got to the huge palace of Xenia, her father, whom she had never known, was dead. The senior girls remembered him, used to discuss him loudly when Edith was in hearing distance, praising him to the skies to salt the wound of her ignorance of him. But when one of them said he must have been a cad to have left Edith's mother, Edith slapped her, nearly got expelled.

After the Revolution, Edith lived by trading the family possessions with the peasants who brought food to the city. She could not understand their sense of values. They were indifferent to costly articles, but gave her a week's supply of food for an old leather album of her family's photographs. After her escape to England, she wrote a historical novel, Young Catherine, a biography of Hadrian, The English Pope, a study, The Catholic Church in Russia, and her moving autobiography that won the $5,000 Little, Brown nonfiction prize in 1941.

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