Molotov’s Magic Lantern

"Unlike the other books, which are wonderful in various ways, this one is beautiful. It is very much a 2010 book – a kind of travel book written by the historian/journalist Rachel Polonsky who lived in Moscow for ten years in the fancy old apartment building which for most of the 20th century housed the party elite. She lived just down the stairs from Molotov’s flat and gets let into it by the investment banker who now rents it, and it still has all his books and his magic lantern. In case anyone reading this doesn’t know, Molotov was Stalin’s Foreign Minister, the one who made the pact with Nazi Germany. He was described by Churchill as being the closest thing to a robot he had ever met. The famous Molotov cocktail, a hand-thrown incendiary device, is named after him. Polonsky writes about the flat radiating outwards through Moscow now, in the 20th century and further back in the past, and then out through Russia’s north, south, east, west and all the way to Siberia. She has written this exquisite meditation on place – not just on big outdoor places but on little domestic interior places. It is like, if you can imagine it, reading a wonderful series of lamp-lit oil painting interiors so you feel like you are reading paintings. It’s about the indoor spaces in which Russian 20th-century history happened. But it is really tough-minded as well. It is a beautiful tough book about furniture and curtains. September 6, 2010. Updated: November 1, 2022 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."

"Both Etkin’s and Polonsky’s books have an admirable way of taking cultural allusions from Russian literary history and using them to explain the history of the time but also the present. Rachel Polonsky’s book is based on her chance discovery of [Vyacheslav] Molotov’s library. Polonsky finds out that her upstairs neighbour’s flat in Moscow still had Molotov’s library in it. Molotov was of course Stalin’s great henchman. He signed 373 death warrants for senior officials, including his close colleagues during the Great Terror, so he was a very bad man. He was also the principal Soviet signatory to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. But he was a bibliophile – he loved books. He had made lots of notes in the books and occasionally even used his moustache hairs as page markers. That’s one axis of this book. The other is the author’s own travels. She goes around all sorts of places in Russia and describes what she finds and links that back into Russian literature, chiefly Molotov’s books but others as well. It’s a very captivating read. You don’t feel you are being bombarded by learning when you’re reading it. But at the end you feel a great deal better informed. It’s what you might call a literary travelogue, although that sounds possibly a bit disparaging because she’s genuinely well-informed about Russia. When she goes to places she doesn’t have the ingenuous naivety of the travel writer . She hones in on what’s important and what really matters. She’s also very determined not to be swept away by this consumerist bombast which is very characteristic of modern Russia – “Look, I’ve got a bigger car than I had last year and I’ve a bigger flat,” and so on. She wrote this book at the height of the Putin boom, so her quite acerbic and at sometimes rather mordant approach to Russia was prescient."