Ninochka (Suny Series, the Margins of Literature)

Rating:
Summary: Boym's Ninochka Has Wide Appeal
Review: Here's one recent novel that I can recommend without reserve, and I know it will appeal to all sorts of readers. Svetlana Boym's first novel Ninochka is a murder mystery in which a contemporary émigrée Tanya Stern, a Ph. D. student in history at Columbia University, attempts to solve the murder of a woman named Nina Belskaya, who went to see the Paris premiere of the film Ninotchka the night before she was murdered late in 1939. Tanya speaks to elderly surviving members of Tanya's circle in Paris, and then her investigation is suddenly rerouted. Tanya's maternal grandmother dies in Leningrad, an event which prompts Tanya to leave Paris and attend her funeral and revisit her natal city for the first time since emigrating. In Russia, she learns of the crossing paths of her grandmother and the dead woman and tries to find out if Nina's murder was a political one prompted by the intrigues of the Stalinist Era.
All sorts of readers will find Ninochka hard to put down. First, it is a skillfully handled mystery story about a long unsolved murder, with evocative descriptions of Paris, Leningrad, Moscow, and New York City. Second, it will appeal to readers who are familiar with Ernst Lubitsch's 1939 film Ninotchka and who would enjoy seeing it presented in terms of the life of Russian exiles in Paris in the late 1930s. Third, the novel grants insight into the Eurasian movement of the 1920s-1930s and its revival since 1991. In general, it offers a perceptive view into the period 1991-1994 and the changes in Russian urban life in that period. The increased visibility of the Eurasianist movement with its aggressive nationalistic agenda in the last ten years adds to the novel's topicality.
Readers will find many provocative and serious reflections on such issues as exile, nostalgia, bilingualism, paranoia and conspiracy theories. The author, a chaired professor at Harvard University, uses no jargon to present her ideas, and the novel will claim both a general readership and an academic audience. Any one desiring to find a further development of the author's ideas should turn to her earlier non-fiction books, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (1991), Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994), and, in particular, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books 2001). Boym's observations on the political uses of utopian nostalgia are particularly shrewd, her novel will prompt you to read further about the Russian exile community and the new Russia, and the mystery will keep you alert to the end.


Peter G. Christensen