Word: koltsovo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1997-1997
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Echoes of a Native Land follows the author's ancestors, the Osorgins, from a time of peace in Koltsovo during the reign of the last tsar to the time of their expulsion from Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. Simultaneously, it traces the history of the peasants of the village to the present...
...progression of time throughout the book, however, is extremely loose. Consecutive stories may be separated by days or centuries. People are introduced, then left unmentioned for chapters, only to reappear years younger. The past of Koltsovo is explained from the outside in. The details create, rather than support, the image. Through their presentation--a piece here and a piece there--a full picture emerges...
This piecewise method of exploring the personal histories of Koltsovo's residents and their families has the remarkable effect of compressing time. Echoes of a Native Land is not a particularly quick read. The narrative reflects research and experience spanning 17 years of the author's life. Yet by not relating the past in chronological order, Schmemann is able to condense 200 years of history into the blink of an eye. As a whole, this compressed history expresses a sense of waste and of sadness for communism's unfortunate effects on Russia's fate and for the country's difficulties...
While the author's diverging and converging method of writing provides an effective impression of Koltsovo, the place, as the sum of the motivations and experiences of its people through-out recent history, the style also leads at times to confusion. The narrative requires that thereader remember earlier references to town residents and family members, several of whom have very similar names, and keep straight the times of different events, organizing them into the proper sequence...
...Echoes of a Native Land, Serge Schmemann provides a unique glimpseinto a set of lives within Russia as they were affected by the Bolshevik revolution. The events of the past are presented according to theirsignificance in Koltsovo, not Moscow, and the result is a narrative that helps explain the psychological effects of communism and the feelings of a set of rural people in the face of a new political order...