{"id":4792,"date":"2023-03-06T06:10:02","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T14:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4792"},"modified":"2023-03-06T06:10:02","modified_gmt":"2023-03-06T14:10:02","slug":"kristen-loesch-the-last-russian-doll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/kristen-loesch-the-last-russian-doll\/","title":{"rendered":"Kristen Loesch: The Last Russian Doll"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Last Russian Doll<\/em> is an epic, set both during the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the more recent revolution \u2013 the one that abolished the Soviet Union in 1991.\u00a0 The more present day heroine, Rosie, or Raisa, her actual name, is a British grad student who fled from Russia with her mother to the UK after the murders of her father and sister.\u00a0 Her mother is now an ancient drunk who rarely gets out of her bed; as the book opens, she dies, but Rosie is headed back to Russia as an assistant to a famous writer (he brings to mind Alexander Solzhenitsyn).\u00a0 She will be there to help with research, but what she really wants is to solve the mystery of her father\u2019s and sister\u2019s deaths.<\/p>\n

In the past, we meet beautiful Tonya, the young, pampered wife of an industrialist.\u00a0 She is bored with her life \u2013 she feels like a captive and one day she encounters a man, a Bolshevist, making an incendiary speech.\u00a0 The man works for her husband and the two are magnetically drawn to one another.\u00a0 While the author refers to Tolstoy in her afterword, this book had far more of a Dr. Zhivago <\/em>feel, Pasternak\u2019s story of revolution and forbidden love finding an echo here.<\/p>\n

Loesch beautifully illustrates the revolution itself as it happens, with the upper classes refusing to believe it will<\/em> happen, and the revolutionaries amazed that it has <\/em>happened.\u00a0 The violence and uncertainty of those times is conveyed in an indelible way, and your heart is in your throat every time Tonya steps out of her safe and protected home.\u00a0 Few escaped disaster and heartbreak at that time, and Tonya and her beloved \u2013 as well as Tonya\u2019s husband \u2013 are no exception.<\/p>\n

Rosie\u2019s clue to her past is found inside the head of a Russian doll that her mother kept close by her throughout her life.\u00a0 The tiny penciled words inside the doll\u2019s head help her begin to make sense of her family roots and her connection to Tonya.\u00a0 Of course, there\u2019s a connection, but the mystery of the novel is just what the connection might be.\u00a0 She\u2019s followed on her journeys through Moscow and to other parts of Russia by a bodyguard, Lev.\u00a0 Her boss knows her family history and is attempting to protect her.\u00a0 Lev, silent and watchful, with ties to the secret police, is her enigmatic and ultimately helpful guide.\u00a0 He can actually read the script from the doll\u2019s head, for example.<\/p>\n

The author ties the book together with short fairy tales that relate back to the action in the novel, though they are opaque and you have to do some work, as a reader, to decipher them. This book broke my heart several times, but the most powerful sequence is set during the siege of Leningrad by the Germans that lasted from 1941 to 1944.\u00a0 The residents of Moscow who didn\u2019t get out were stuck in a city with no heat and no food, many of them so starving they resorted to cannibalism.\u00a0 The heartbreak endured by Tonya and her family is almost too much to bear, and yet, millions of Russians suffered during the war as Tonya and her family did.<\/p>\n

The two story threads and the relationship between the two women draws closer and closer as the book draws to an end.\u00a0 I loved these two women, though Tonya is the better drawn of the two, Rosie is an interesting character living through an interesting and historic moment in Russia\u2019s history \u2013 just as Tonya did.\u00a0 The cliched curse, of course, is may you live in interesting times.\u00a0 <\/em>These are interesting times to read about, but I\u2019m sure they were painful to live through. \u00a0The one weak spot in this novel was the actual reason for the deaths of Rosie\u2019s family members, but I could overlook it as the rest of the story was so compelling and hard to look away from.\u00a0 This is a wonderful read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Last Russian Doll is an epic, set both during the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the more recent revolution \u2013 the one that abolished the Soviet Union in 1991.\u00a0 The more present day heroine, Rosie, or Raisa, her actual name, is a British grad student who fled from Russia with her mother to the UK … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[189,1074,1052,1054,10,1053,1051,1055,1050],"class_list":["post-4792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-berkley","tag-dr-zhivago","tag-end-of-the-soviet-union","tag-forbidden-love","tag-historical","tag-kristen-loesch","tag-russian-revolution","tag-tangled-family-history","tag-the-last-russian-doll"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4792"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4829,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4792\/revisions\/4829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}