Russian Blood

It was disconcerting reading Russian Blood, A Family Chronicle. The story of the author's antecedents' lives in pre-Revolutionary Russia was, indeed, evocative of a lost time and place, but one could not help realizing that the period in which this book was written, researched, and published occurred prior to its 1982 date of publication. The young man who so well detailed, in particular, his paternal and maternal grandmothers' travails in escaping Bolshevik revenge in order to forge new lives in the United States has passed well into middle age (haven't we all?); the system that destroyed the way of life he chronicled has, too, passed onto the junk heap of history. True to the Russian nature of exuberance and generosity, one is served up more than an ample banquet of family history and reflection here (as well as maybe too much if a reader does not share the writer's (and his father's and uncle's)) family passion for butterflies and geology or what seems like an inherent need to establish high social pedigree vis-à-vis the old East Coast set. One matter of confusion: at some point this reader began to wonder to what extent certain branches of the Shoumatoff family were Ukrainian rather than Russian. This matter might have been amplified. That being said, it is too bad that Shoumatoff has not given us, in the intervening years, the memoir of his own life. When he touches on the truly personal, he leaves the reader wanting more. What was it like for him to grow up and establish his own American identity? What does he see for Russia now? A publisher would do well to ask him to undertake a personal story with himself as sole focus, or a travel edition in which he can "rediscover" Russia for us in this new century.