Vanora Bennett's Reading List

"Yes. This is the story of the 19th-century war between colonial Russia and the tough, fiercely independent mountain tribes they needed to control if they were to have easy access to their new territory of Georgia, on the southern side of the Caucasus mountains. In those days the mountaineers were united against Russia under Imam Shamil. Shamil’s war went on for half a lifetime. Many of the Russian writers of the day served in the war – notably Pushkin and Lermontov – and they wrote about it; so it’s remembered to this day, as literature rather than history. Tolstoy’s book is about a Shamil lieutenant, Hadji Murad, who goes over to the Russians, then tries to go back. What I like about it is that it shows war as profoundly ignoble – as an awful combination of personal circumstances that end in disaster for everyone. Hadji Murad, it turns out, was forced by tribal politics to join Shamil and become his star fighter; he turns to the Russians because he’s forced by more murderous tribal politics. He fears for his family and he tries to go back, with disastrous consequences, because rivalries among the Russian generals mean he doesn’t get the honourable deal from them that he’s been promised. Tolstoy is fearless in showing everyone in the theatre of war trapped between two tyrannies, the Russian tyranny a terrifying imposition, but the demands of the mountain armies no less tyrannical. The book also has a powerful and much-quoted description of how Chechen villagers feel when their homes are burned to the ground by Russian troops. “No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings … the desire to exterminate them – like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves – was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.”"

"It is. This next one is a collection of authoritative essays on how Russians and the mountain peoples of the Caucasus (among other Muslims in the former Soviet world) have interacted, from the end of the 19th-century wars to the outbreak of a modern Russian-Chechen war in 1994. There are accounts of various Russian persecutions right through the 20th century, and how they only stifled but never quite eradicated the spirit of the mountain peoples. Russian policies were aimed at bringing all Soviet peoples together in a Russian-speaking, post-religious, freely-intermarrying community. That didn’t fit with what the mountain people wanted. There are accounts of brutal Russian suppression of unrest in the Caucasus early in the 20th century, and of the mass deportation of the Chechens and other mountain peoples to the steppes of Central Asia during World War Two, after Stalin implausibly accused the Chechens of collaborating with the Nazis. The Chechens who survived (many tens of thousands died) were allowed back after Stalin’s death; but resentment, of course, lingers on. There’s a lot in this book, too, about the way Soviet Muslims learned to hide their faith to counter Russianisation; the preservation of religious belief through anything from secret meetings to, later, cassette recordings of sermons, sold in scruffy street markets, right under the noses of the Soviet authorities. And there are fascinating descriptions of the folksy Sufi form of Islam, with saints and shrines and wishing-wells and a traditional prayer in the form of a round-dance, the zikr, that, at least until the modern war, was how Chechens preferred to worship."

"The first two. A Small Victorious War is a very thorough, practical guide to the first of two post-Soviet wars in Chechnya. The authors interviewed everyone connected with the war, except maybe Boris Yeltsin. Their book tells the story of how and why newly independent Russia, in 1991, first gave its various ethnic minorities what the president called “as much independence as you can swallow” and then, a couple of years later, reined them back in – and how Chechnya, alone, refused to give in, leading to war. Chechnya had been run since independence by Dzhokhar Dudayev, whose enthusiasm for independence was probably genuine but whose claims that it could be easily financed, because Chechnya had enough oil to make it as rich as Kuwait, didn’t measure up against reality when Russia imposed an economic blockade. With President Yeltsin surrounded by an increasingly unpleasant bunch of hardliners, led by his bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov, Russia’s generals came to feel they could follow the lead of America in Haiti, and boost their administration’s popularity with a quick war to depose what they regarded as an unpleasant little regime on their southern border. They counted without the two centuries of accumulated resentment of Chechens for their Russian invaders; and then they bungled it, and found themselves mired in a long-running, bloody, chaotic and unpopular repeat of the 19th century."

"Baiev’s The Oath is probably the least well-known of my books and yet in some ways it’s the best. It’s an eyewitness account by an ordinary Chechen doctor who went home to stitch up wounds and served in the various makeshift hospitals around Grozny during both modern wars – both Yeltsin’s and the war that began under the next president, Vladimir Putin, in 2000. What’s unusual about it is not just the way it brings the facts of both wars to terrifying life, but that Baiev decided to drop the Chechens’ usual reticence about family and personal life and put a lot of the gallant, quietly courageous people in his life, and their backgrounds and memories, into the book. Most books about Chechnya take sides, one way or another. But Baiev is unflinchingly objective. He describes searing Russian injustices and brutalities. But he also shows how war gives Chechen neighbourhood bullies, like the Barayev family, the chance to turn into monsters (the Barayevs are said to have had a hand in many of the most notorious murders of the war, including the beheadings of four British telecoms engineers in 1998). By insisting on treating both Chechens and Russians, as the Hippocratic Oath demands, Baiev fell foul of both camps and had many hair-raising escapes from death. In the end, he had to escape to America, where he can no longer practise as a doctor. More than anything else, it was the uncomplaining, stoical tone of this book that reminded me of being among Chechens during the first war."

"There are no superlatives too superlative for Anna Politkovskaya, who, after three books and innumerable investigative reporting trips to Chechnya, was murdered, execution-style, outside her Moscow apartment in 2007. Politkovskaya, a social affairs reporter, was sent to Chechnya in 2000 by her liberal newspaper editor to cover the second, Putin-era, war, not because she knew about wars but because she was “just a civilian”. She turned out to be the best possible kind of Moscow intellectual – a fearless truth-teller. She took issue with the swaggering, macho, murderous pro-Moscow leaders of today’s Chechnya, under Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, (she campaigned against Putin’s man in Chechnya being named to run the region, interviewing people who’d been interrogated by him and publishing reports that he was a sadistic torturer who enjoyed stripping the skin off his victims’ backs).Yet Politkovskaya had no romantic sympathies with the freedom fighters either. Her targets also included the swaggering, macho, murderous anti-Moscow separatists led by Shamil Basayev, now dead, whose extremism plunged Chechnya into a second war against Putin’s forces in 1999 and brought disaster to hundreds of thousands of ordinary Chechen civilians. She’d had considerable sympathy for earlier, moderate, separatists, under Aslan Maskhadov, who’d tried to find accommodation with Moscow as well as more freedom for their people. But, if Politkovskaya was on anyone’s side, it was that of ordinary civilians. Civilians in Chechnya, torn between two rival tyrannies, who couldn’t get their own stories heard by the world – the people who get woken up by soldiers taking their teenage daughter away to rape, or who lose their legs treading on mines, or whose neighbours get their throats cut or their fingers cut off – whose predicament she movingly described. And, of course, she was on the side of ordinary Russians – the people increasingly hemmed in by a blinkered press and ignorant of the world’s bigger realities. What motivated Politkovskaya to go on braving the danger of Chechnya, long after Putin made it clear that journalists were not welcome at his war, was more than compassion. It was the conviction that Russians needed to know what was being done in their name in the secretive south, behind army lines. “I’m sure this has to be done, for one simple reason,” she wrote briskly in A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. “As contemporaries of this war, we will be held responsible for it. The classic Soviet excuse of not being there and not taking part in anything personally won’t work. So I want you to know the truth. Then you’ll be free of cynicism.” The breathtaking horror – and cynicism – she uncovered gave her a mission so important that she separated with her husband and ignored her son’s pleas to stop her new work. Her discoveries are detailed in this extraordinary book, beautifully written, but so full of tragedy it makes the hairs rise on the nape of your neck. She found corrupt Russian soldiers working hand-in-glove with shady Chechen criminals and political extremists. Her stories put flesh on the widely held belief that Chechnya is a for-profit war. The Russian army, which faces being scaled down as there is no Soviet bloc to defend, has found in Chechnya an excuse to perpetuate itself – and get rich. The economics are grisly: a civilian kept in a pit, alive, by Russian soldiers is worth a ransom from his relatives; a corpse’s price is rather higher. “Everyone has found a niche,” she wrote. “The mercenaries at the checkpoints get bribes of ten to 20 roubles around the clock. The generals in Moscow and Chechnya use their war budget for personal gain. Officers of the middle ranks collect ransom for temporary hostages and corpses. Junior officers get to go marauding during the purges.” Hence an official policy based on, at best, outrageous distortions of the truth, and a landscape empty of heroes or winners. Politkovskaya’s discoveries gave her life a strange new shape. She negotiated with Chechen hostage-takers who took over Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre in October 2002 (a friend of her son’s was among the prisoners). She was subjected to a mock execution by security forces in Chechnya. Kadyrov’s father, an earlier pro-Russian president of Chechnya, “publicly threatened to murder me. He actually said during a meeting of his government that Politkovskaya was a condemned woman”. In 2004, during the siege by Chechen separatists of a school at Beslan in southern Russia, she was asked, by the Chechens, to join the negotiations. She was on the plane south, hoping both to report on the crisis and to act as an intermediary and help to get hundreds of child prisoners out of the boobytrapped gym. But she was slipped a Mickey Finn [drink laced with drugs] on the plane. The next thing she knew, she was in hospital and it was several days later – too late for the children, who had by then been killed in their hundreds. What she remembered of the experience was the three men she’d noticed in the plane, staring at her with the “eyes of enemies”. She blamed the Russian secret services for poisoning her. Politkovskaya’s killer has never been named. Nor has the killer of another Russian whistle-blower, Sasha Litvinenko, who was slipped a dose of radioactive polonium in Piccadilly a month later, or a host of other anti-war activists who have met strange, untimely ends during Vladimir Putin’s Russian presidency. It is some consolation to know that, while Politkovskaya’s books are still in print, her voice has not been silenced."

"Partly because it’s one of my favourite books of all time and partly because I think it counts as a historical novel in my definition, which is very broad and is simply a novel that shows people’s lives from an earlier time. I don’t like the idea of containing historical fiction in this genre ghetto where you are sort of writing for the women’s market and you’ve got a lot of patronising. I love this idea that Tolstoy is telling this story from the past and meditating on what he thinks the nature of history is about. His idea is that it is very much an accident that things happen, and there are these small things – someone is in a bad mood at the time – that have vast repercussions across people’s lives. I love that. There are these Napoleon figures, these very vulgar kind of post-revolutionary French figures who are destroying the old Europe and who are mixed up with our heroes and heroines living their lives. I think it’s the most amazing mixture. Yes, absolutely. It’s a panorama and you see everything from these epic battle scenes to a magical sleigh ride at night in the snow, which was the most beautiful and lyrical passage. You do have the sense of the whole of society interacting as they fall in love or their fortunes change because of the war; you see things on a big scale as well as a small scale at the same time."

"I read this a few years ago and it was one of those books you always remember because it creates a whole new way of thinking. I had no idea at the time that the medieval mindset was any different to the modern one. It is about the adventure of a Franciscan friar and his novice in medieval Italy and it is part murder mystery, part game with semiotics and medieval knowledge. At university I read lots of French books referring to this medieval period where all knowledge was supposed to be classified, and re-classified and super-classified, and it became sort of idiotic, this academic approach that these monks had. Yet there was something amazing about this belief that you could classify knowledge. It’s also very good storytelling, but the part I remember was the sort of library filled with knowledge and these games, which teased you with knowing things and not knowing things. It’s just this very complex mindset that’s really different from our own and because I knew nothing about it, it was just terribly exciting to be taken off into this world. I must say that I have tried to read a couple of other books by Umberto Eco and found them quite difficult, so I think he was reaching out to the world of fiction . There was an interesting book that I read recently by him about art and beauty in the Middle Ages , but it was so much more an academic book. I think The Name of the Rose crosses boundaries in a way that others don’t."

"This one is really complicated – maybe I just like them complicated. Pears is also a really intelligent man and has oscillated between writing fiction for entertainment and academics. He’s lived in Italy and he’s a professor and this book sort of speaks to all of those things. On the face of it, it’s about a murder in 17th-century Oxford, but quite amazing things are going on that are creepy yet fascinating. There were things I hadn’t thought about before like body stealing to learn dissections and anatomy. There is a lot about this rudimentary science, well, rudimentary to us but very exciting and magical to them. The first part of the book is told by one character and you feel you’ve learned the story. You get to the next part and it’s one of the other characters telling the same story but from his point of view and it’s really different. There are four characters who each tell it and each time you learn something new. Then you’re thinking it’s a clever game, but with the final story it suddenly becomes something different. I don’t want to give the story away but it’s a very moving and strange story with these religious overtones and it’s just amazing. It really blows you away. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think it is reinforcing the way that the boundaries were being shifted at the time and that knowledge was expanding. You’re looking at the cadaver from different points of view and then looking at the story from different points of view too. It all fits together very beautifully. Then there’s the shock of something else."

"I love everything Hilary Mantel writes. She writes really dark things – historical novels and contemporary novels, they’ve all been extremely good. She’s got a real sense of other life out there and she weaves it brilliantly into her retelling of life as we live it. This is the first time she has taken on the hugest moment in British history; she’s gone from glimpses and cameos into this centre stage thing. The Tudor monarchy has a big moment with England leaving the Church of Rome for love – that’s the moment every film and television writer is interested in. She turns it upside down. The idea that we’ve all held to be true is that Thomas More was the good guy, the man with the principles, who was prepared to die for them. He stood by his Catholicism and resigned from being Henry VIII’s servant and wouldn’t go with the change in church. Whereas Thomas Cromwell, who came afterwards, we’ve tended to believe that he was a bad guy. There’s a nasty picture of him by Holbein looking very thuggish, with slitty little eyes. She takes this Thomas Cromwell, who we think of as the bad guy, as her hero. Not an out-and-out hero but he is a nuanced character and she sort of remakes him as a human. She does re-create this sense of unexpectedness and threat and how is it going to end? Mostly we are too familiar with this story, we’ve lost that sense of how is it going to end?, so it’s very fascinating and very modern. Thomas Cromwell is a boy from the gutter whose dad was a drunkard from Putney and he sort of arrived by his own merits. Anne Boleyn is this hugely ambitious girl, not beautiful but bug-eyed and calculating like a sparrow on speed. All the ladies pinch and push and all the aristocrats are these puffed-up fools who are cushioned by their sense of entitlement. Cromwell has ten times their brain power and is sly. He might look like a thug on the outside but he’s smarter than you think; he can outwit them and run rings round them. Yet unexpectedly he has this gift of compassion and he is able to look at people and pity them. By reinvestigating Thomas Cromwell she has managed to shed a whole new light on the story and her telling of it is very plausible as well."

"It is. It’s about a girl named Nan who goes off to the Pantomime Theatre, which is on the South Coast of England, and sees a girl named Kitty, who is a male impersonator, on the stage and falls in love with her. You’re not sure if it’s a sexual love or a girlish crush but she does go off to London with her and it does turn into a love affair. They begin living together but it becomes complicated because they have to hide. Then Kitty falls in love with a man and Nan is heartbroken and goes off into this strange Edwardian underworld. She sets off as a male-impersonating prostitute for a little bit and goes off with men who think she is a boy, and it’s all very odd. She then gets taken in by an aristocratic woman who wants to keep her as a mistress. Finally, she ends up living with a family who are poor and hardworking and who are saving the underclass from themselves. At this point, all these lovers from her past come back and she has to choose. You feel she is going to go off with Kitty, but is she? What I like is Waters’s sense of being very true. I think she was writing a PhD about London theatre at the turn of the century and then thought, well, I should do something that people want to read. It’s a very complete world; you really feel that you are there and that all these things are happening and you don’t have a moment where you find it hard to suspend your disbelief. Exactly. I sort of had this feeling when I first started to read it that it was trying quite hard on this shocking chic of lesbian love and overstressing it. By the end though, it became a love story and it was sort of conventional – conventional in the sense that it came down to who she loved and who was the right person for her. It transcended the fact that they were women and gay. I didn’t read it for a long time thinking that I wouldn’t enjoy the book, and it was sort of better than the sum of its parts in all kinds of ways. I really was pleased to have discovered it."