Customer Reviews

Russian Journal

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4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
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I picked up this book without great expectations. I was merely doing an assignment for English class, but I found the book to be delightful and interesting. I couldn't seem to put it down, and when I finished, I recounted how much I learned. The descriptions of Ms. Lee's surroundings were detailed so one could easily picture the architecture in one's mind. The descriptions of Russian citizens are most intriguing because of Ms. Lee's opportunity to become close friends, not acquaintences with them. All in all, a good read that teaches a lot.

This was an unexpected gem. Russian Journal is a great read for people who love to travel or who don't travel but want to. It was less a journal and more a love letter to the people of Russia that the author met in the late 1970s. I easily could picture the harsh architecture and the warm people, what a startling contrast! I began the book wondering about Andrea's experiences (will she encounter the KGB? etc.) and by the end I was curious about her friends and wanting to go there myself. I am actually leaving in 15 months for a year long stay.

Andrea Lee and her husband were Harvard graduate students who went to Russia for advanced studies. Ms. Lee wrote a series of essays that captures the people she met and the events and spirit that would eventually lead the Soviet Union to "freedom" and the collapse of communism. Her style is unique, and her insights into the people she met are beautifully described, with occasional flashes of irony and clever observation. For example, she notes that (in an essay on farmer's markets) that the Russians have done to architecture what American's have done to food: gone for size without taste. Is it outdated? Of course it is, this was a country beginning to fray around the edges (this was the mid '70's) politically, but she captures the spirit of the people she met and the country she saw (the "unofficial" one) perfectly. As a depiction of a time and a place it is a wonderful read, and she has a style (or voice) that is uniquely her own. I for one, am glad that this "place" no longer exists, but I am glad that this book does if for no other reason than to remind one of the harsh conditions under which the Russian people lived for so long. It is a small masterpiece of the "travel" genre, and an excellent example of the art of the essay. It is literature, not history, a fact that seems to have been lost on some of the reviewers.

Sure, Andrea Lee comes off smug at times....but she is being honest! And she was 25! What an amazing writer.

While one immediately realizes that this book is a bit outdated, that does not make it less poetic and a vibrant portrait of a repressed people. This book made me fall in love with Russian culture and people, even at its darkest time Lee paints a lovely (and realistic) portrait of a country and a people. Very worth picking up!

Having lived in Post-Soviet Russia for three years, I picked up Andrea Lee's book with the interest of a wanderer who has found a kindred spirit, someone with whom to compare stories of a similar fish-out-of-water experience. Upon first reading, the differences between our Russias were immediately apparent: Lee's year in Moscow and St. Petersburg was back in the Soviet days, and her life there was more closely regulated and contrived, partially due to the constraints put upon her, both real and imagined, by the Soviet authorities, and partially due to the nature of her visit, seemingly a study-abroad trip taken by her russophile husband with her in tow. Her experiences were thus limited to the State-allowed tourist sites, the geographical and cultural limitations of her two cities of residency, and her own brief explorations.
She and I were both struck during our time by the warmth of the Russian people to foreigeners, and the curiosity of meeting and talking with a "real American." However, her descriptions of her surroundings, the people she meets, and her overall experience are tainted by her own cultural arrogance. At least once in every chapter, she spoils the reader's enjoyment of her impressions with a subtle and perfectly placed insult to the cultural, artistic, or aesthetic sensibilities of the Russian People, if not merely their personal habits. The dormitory in Moscow where she makes her home is "vulgar." A friend eats "greedily, bending over her plate, mumbling through her food." Another friend's hat offends her fashion-conscious eye, and is dismissed as "absurd." Even St. Basil's Cathedral, the 15th-century Byzantine-influenced church standing in Red Square as the very symbol of Russia, cannot escape her critical and self-absorbed judgement: she pronounces it "preposterous."
Lee has a gift for descriptive writing, an ability to bring the reader, through her tastes, smells and sights, right there beside her on the Moscow Metro, in the steambaths, or the home of a Soviet journalist. Unfortunately, her impressive talents are invariable used to convey (perhaps unintendedly) her overall disdain with everything that makes Russia (and the Russian people) truly Russia; indeed, everything not American. Like poorly made borsch, her effort leaves the reader with a bad taste in the mouth.

Andrea Lee's Russian Journal contains essays about the ten months she lived in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. It is a prosaic memoir of the telling details that made up life under the Soviet System, the cramped housing and long lines for goods and food, the black market for jeans and anything western, the dual lives of Soviet citizens, the private life hidden from outside (KGB) surveillance versus the public responsibility of compulsory meetings and work assignments and mouthing of Soviet allegiance while decrying the decadence of the West. Jimmy Carter was President, the Soviet Union was preparing for the Olympics the United States would end up boycotting, and the idea of a crumbling Soviet system symbolized by the fallen Berlin Wall was really inconceivable, no matter what people say now, in retrospect.

What is most interesting about this memoir are Lee's many conversations with Russians who were convinced (no matter how western-crazed they were) that America and its way of life -- decadent, materialistic, lacking patriotism and spirituality -- would inevitably fail and that the Soviet System would triumph. They were wrong about the Soviet System. But given where the United States is right now, after decades of materialism gone wild and capitalism gone rampant, they may have been right in their predictions about us.

It seems strange that a book like this warrants a reprint, when it's not only outdated, but clearly tendencious. Russia today is quite different from the Soviet Russia in the 70s. Makes me wonder, whose interests are served by pushing the image of vulgar, grim and uncivilized Russia.