40 The New York Review
critical programs in return for Kremlin
goodwill.
The Compatriots contains many
useful subplots like this one, but they
don’t necessarily add up to a satisfying
whole. The main problem is that Solda-
tov and Borogan haven’t quite figured
out what story they want to tell. They
devote a lot of space to overseas assas-
sinations, but the book doesn’t really
work as a history of Russia’s targeted
killings.^3 Some of the most notori-
ous examples—including both Skripal
and Litvinenko—barely earn a men-
tion, apparently in the flawed assump-
tion that readers already know all the
details.
Soldatov and Borogan make simi-
larly passing reference to a particularly
revealing operation in 1959, when the
KGB succeeded in killing the Ukrai-
nian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera
in his Munich exile with a cyanide spray.
The murderer, Bogdan Stashinsky, was
arrested by the Germans, served time
in jail, and declined, upon his release,
to return to the USSR—thereby be-
coming a member of the same Soviet
diaspora to which his target had be-
longed. The Harvard historian Serhii
Plokhy has written an engrossing and
meticulously researched account of the
Bandera killing, The Man with the Poi-
son Gun (2016). It makes for a riveting
case study in the use of murder as an
instrument of Soviet policy. Soldatov
and Borogan could have learned from
its example.3.
The subtitle of The Compatriots an-
nounces that Borogan and Soldatov as-
pire to tell the tale of “Russia’s exiles,
émigrés, and agents abroad.” But they
don’t really do that, either. Here’s how
they describe the community of exiles
after the Bolshevik Revolution:But instead of thinking of the fu-
ture, the intelligentsia kept talk-
ing about the past. They seemed
trapped in thousands of poignant
what-ifs: What if World War I
hadn’t broken out, the tsar hadn’t
abdicated, Lenin was refused
entry into the country, the allies
hadn’t betrayed the White Cause?
Years, then decades, passed in
conversations like these. They con-
tinued, endlessly, in kitchens and
cafés, salons and meeting halls,
from Harbin to Belgrade, Paris to
Constantinople.
Dwelling on the past didn’t
answer any questions about the
future, and it was a surefire way
to lose touch with the realities of
everyday life back in the Soviet
Union.This portrayal is a caricature that
echoes Soviet-era propaganda, whichwent to great lengths to depict those
who left the USSR as the castoffs of
history, myopic tsarist aristocrats filled
with nostalgia for their old mansions
and estates. The reality was far more
interesting.
The post-1917 wave of exiles encom-
passed a startling range of talents. One
need mention only a few of those who
ended up in the United States (far from
the only country to be enriched by their
presence). Vladimir Zworykin, who
left Russia in 1918, gained fame as an
inventor of the television. The econo-
mist Simon Kuznets became a US gov-
ernment planner during World War
II and later won the Nobel Prize. Igor
Sikorski, a pioneering aircraft designer
who played a vital part in the devel-
opment of the helicopter, abandoned
his homeland in 1919. The composers
Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravin-
sky also ended up choosing life in the
United States. George Balanchine,
who departed Russia for good in 1924,
transformed American ballet; Vladi-
mir Nabokov, who left in 1919, had a
profound effect on American literature.
Nabokov’s father, incidentally, em-
bodied the political complexity of the
emigration. A lawyer with a staunch be-
lief in liberal democracy, he was a fierce
opponent of the monarchy who lobbied
against capital punishment during the
final years of the Romanov era, then
served in the provisional government
in 1917 until the Bolshevik coup. Such
figures belied the Soviet tactic of re-
flexively characterizing all émigrés as
“Whites” who yearned for the restora-
tion of the Romanovs. Nabokov senior
was assassinated by a right-wing ex-
tremist at a political meeting in Berlin
in 1922—not by a Soviet agent but by a
fellow émigré.
Soldatov and Borogan do tell the
stories of a few celebrated defectors,
notably Stalin’s star-crossed daugh-
ter Svetlana Alliluyeva, who returned
to the USSR for two years before
redefecting to the West in 1986, and
the ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Yet here, too, they end up leaving far
too much untold. I particularly missed
a mention of Viktor Kravchenko, a
Soviet bureaucrat who defected to the
United States during World War II and
later published one of the first accounts
of the Gulag to appear in the West. He
lived in constant fear of assassination
at the hands of Soviet agents; Stalin
made sure that Kravchenko’s son was
packed off to the Gulag for the crime of
having a father deemed a traitor. This
tale would have made a perfect fit with
the authors’ effort to chart the “bru-
tal and chaotic history” of the Rus-
sian diaspora. There is no mention of
Kravchenko in the book.
A satisfying account of the Russian
diaspora from 1917 to the present re-
mains to be written. In our globalizing
world, we have come to understand
that migration, innovation, and creativ-
ity are fundamentally interconnected
in the story of humankind. The forma-
tion of the Russian diaspora must count
as one of its most instructive chapters.
One can only hope that someone will
take on the task of telling it. QNew York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics and Poets, The New York Review Children’s Collection, and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank Managing Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Lucas Adams
Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During, Publicity; Abigail Dunn, Marketing Manager; Alex Ransom,
Marketing Assistant; Evan Johnston and Daniel Drake, Production; Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
Yongsun Bark, Distribution.(^3) In this respect, I couldn’t help com-
paring the book to Ronen Bergman’s
masterful Rise and Kill First: The Se-
cret History of Israel’s Targeted Assas-
sinations (Random House, 2018).
MARROW
AND BONE
Walter Kempowski
Translated from the German by
Charlotte Collins
Paperback • $16.95
Also available as an e-book
On sale March 24th
“[A] subtly devastating portrait of how
a life can be defined by memories
of past suffering, even when those
memories appear to be submerged
under a calm surface.”
—Lucian Robinson,
The Times Literary Supplement
ALSO BY WALTER KEMPOWSKI
ALL FOR NOTHING
“[Marrow and Bone] walks a tightrope
between black humor and horror... the past
bleeds, unasked and largely unremarked,
into the present; in the end, neither German
suffering nor German guilt can be suppressed.”
—Melissa Harrison, The Guardian
West Germany, 1988, just before the fall of the
Berlin Wall: Jonathan Fabrizius, a middle-aged
erstwhile journalist, has a comfortable existence
in Hamburg, bankrolled by his uncle. He lives with
his girlfriend in a prewar house that just by
chance escaped annihilation by the Allied bomb-
ers. One day Jonathan receives a package in the
mail from a luxury car company, commissioning
him to travel through the People’s Republic of
Poland and to write about the route for a car rally.
The journey takes him to his birthplace, for
Jonathan is a war orphan from former East
Prussia, whose mother breathed her last breath
fleeing the Russians and whose father, a Nazi
soldier, was killed on the Baltic coast. What
follows is a darkly comic road trip, a queasy
misadventure of West German tourists in
Communist Poland, and a reckoning that is by
turns subtle, satiric, and genuine. Marrow and
Bone is an uncomfortably funny and revelatory
odyssey by one of the most talented and nu-
anced writers of postwar Germany.
“Kempowski’s Marrow and Bone is a staggering
book about our blind spots, the dead who live
within us. About the cruelty of the human race,
which is more fundamental to our nature than
the concept of guilt by which we seek to exorcise
it. And about our forsakenness in the world,
which is greater than the daily routines in which
we try to find salvation.” —Jenny Erpenbeck
Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,
or visit http://www.nyrb.com
MARGERY KEMPE
Robert Glück
Introduction by Colm Tóibín
Paperback^ •^ $15.95
Also available as an e-book
On sale March 10th
“By the bold device of telling two
stories in terms of each other (one of
Margery Kempe and Jesus, and the
other of a twentieth-century love affair),
Robert Glück has produced a book
without precedent. This novel brings
to mind the huge wings of a painted
angel—a texture of brilliant richness
covered regularly with small, detailed
shadows of implication.” —Thom Gunn
EVENTS WITH ROBERT GLÜCK
Thursday, March 26th, 7pm
CITY LIGHTS BOOKSELLERS
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco
in conversation with Brandon Brown
Monday, March 30th, 7pm
MCNALLY JACKSON
52 Prince Street, New York
“At once embracing and thwarting
two worlds, two centuries, two sensibilities,
what a subtle and powerful amalgam is
Margery! Glück’s exquisitely controlled,
sensuously textured writing evokes a deeply
integrated ecstatic vision that in the end
spares us nothing—being nuanced and
brutal, passionate and colored with levity,
elegant and outrageous.” —Lydia Davis
First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery
Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant,
and inventive American novels of the last quar-
ter century.
The book tells two stories of romantic obsession.
One, based on the first autobiography in English,
the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about
a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a vi-
sionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land,
and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with
Jesus. The other is about the author’s own love
for an alluring and elusive young American, L.
Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel,
emerges as an unprecedented exploration of
desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obses-
sion in the form of a novel like no other novel.
Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison
to the finest work of writers such as Kathy Acker
and Chris Kraus.
This edition includes an essay by Glück about
the creation of the book titled “My Margery,
Margery’s Bob.”
“I, for one, find much to admire in contemporary
gay authors. One of my favorites is Robert Glück.”
—Edmund White
Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,
or visit http://www.nyrb.com