I've always read books to travel to other places. Growing up in Moscow, in the Brezhnev era, I dove into books to escape the drabness and oppression of Soviet life. After emigrating to America and enrolling in high school in Boston, I read novels during math classes because I never like that subject, could get away with avoiding it in the more lenient American school, and sought greater excitement of the written word. Dispirited by academic politics as a graduate student and an aspiring professor, I found in reading and writing safe harbors of refuge and joy.
A Bunting Fellowship (administered by the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard) gave me an idea to devote myself to these forms of indulgence full-time. I did not think of myself as a born writer, not like people who begin constructing stories at age 5 and never stop. I was astonished when one day, chancing upon a tattered notebook I had brought with me from Russia, I opened its cover and read on its opening page: "Chapter 1 - How I began to write." My best friend and I spent countless afternoons creating an elaborate fictional world in which we were captains of a pirate ship, sailing across stormy seas and lording it over a motley crew that included Dumas' Three Musketeers, popular Russian bards, and other heroes of our youth. We embarked on these adventures first with the help of dolls, then paper cut-outs, then notebooks in which we feverishly scribbled our stories, inspired by all sorts of books we read, but especially those set in the past. I guess the desire to read and write about history has been with me since my childhood after all.
History remains the subject of endless fascination for me, a driving motor behind my books, a lens through which I view the world around me. It might be my Russian roots, my emigrant's deracination, or just innate curiosity that always makes me wonder how things came about, and why.
