The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street
a Russian adventure
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
‘History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.’
One day in 1988, an enigmatic priest knocks on Pieter Waterdrinker’s door with an unusual request: will he smuggle seven-thousand bibles into the Soviet Union. Pieter agrees, and soon finds himself living in the midst of one of the biggest social and cultural revolutions of our time, working as a tour operator ... with a sideline in contraband.
Thirty years later, from his apartment on Tchaikovsky Street in Saint Petersburg, where he lives with his Russian wife and three cats, Pieter reflects on his personal history in the Soviet Union, as well as the century of revolutions that took place in and around his street. A master storyteller, he blends history with memoir to create an ode to the divided soul of Russia and an unputdownable account of his own struggles with life, literature, and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and journalist Waterdrinker (The Rat of Amsterdam) interweaves memoir and history in this impressionistic account of Russia from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the present day. After helping to smuggle thousands of Cyrillic Bibles into Russia in 1988, Waterdrinker stayed in the country and found work as a tour guide before marrying a Russian woman and settling in an apartment on Tchaikovsky Street in St. Petersburg. Interspersed with his colorful profiles of ordinary Russians, including his in-laws, are sketches of the 1905 uprising that served as a "prelude" to the 1917 revolution and the bloody civil war that engulfed the country after the abdication of Nicholas II. Waterdrinker also profiles historical figures who lived on Tchaikovsky Street, including poet Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945), and recounts the Red Army's massacre of anti-communist protestors in Tbilisi, Georgia, in April 1989. Though he wanders far afield—into the indignities of the writer's life and the health of his cats, among other topics—Waterdrinker incisively captures the beauty and terror of his adopted country. Russophiles will savor this iconoclastic portrait of modern Russia.
