Дональд Джеймс: The Fall of the Russian Empire

Surrounded by her ministers and a group of senior Army officers she had stood in the biting wind while a single trumpeter played a lament. Before the party filed away, the snow was already recovering the grave.

Perhaps the wheel of fortune is too naturally warped to run true. But I am completing the last pages of this book, where I first conceived it, in the de Nerval château in central France. My mother’s blue-leather traveling trunk lies before me. She had carried it and her child, myself (with old Sophie de Nerval’s help) hundreds upon hundreds of miles across Russia, to the refugee camps which were set up on Russia’s borders during the last agony of the Soviet Union. In one of these camps she died, still a young woman, but not before she had collected accounts, memoirs, copies of diaries from others who had fled and survived the Sovietschina.

I owe to the obsessions of a snobbish old woman my de Nerval name. But I owe, too, to that same Sophie de Nerval, my discovery of the papers my mother had collected. Where else would the old lady will the trunk but to that château in France where she imagined, rightly or not, she had been conceived?

I close the tattered leather trunk before me. In my hand I hold one last scrap of paper. I will include this, too.

The night before she had begun her long journey to the West, my mother received a package from a hospital orderly. The last memoir written by my father, Igor Bukansky, was placed in the trunk. The contents of the letter accompanying the memoir, she never revealed. Only the words on a separate scrap of paper:

Copyright © Donald James 1982

The right of Donald James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

First published in the United Kingdom in 1982 by HarperCollins.

This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.