Black Earth City
When Russia Ran Wild (And So Did We)
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A young woman's heady encounter with the new Russia, as she and the country thrill to their first taste of freedom
It is September 1991 and the dismantling of the Soviet Union is under way. In Voronezh, a provincial town famous for its loamy black earth, a sense of lightheartedness-part fear, part exhilaration-pervades. The people conquer uncertainty, hunger, and -20 degree temperatures by drinking huge quantities of black-market vodka and reveling in their new-found sexual freedom.
Black Earth City is Charlotte Hobson's record of this tumultuous time. An irresistible guide, she brings us into the cramped, rundown Hostel no. 4, where international students and locals congregate. We meet Yakov, who blows half-a-million rubles on a taxi to see a girl in Minsk; Lola, who sleeps with her peers for a share of their dinner; Viktor, with his brutal memories of military service; and Mitya, Hobson's wild and optimistic lover whose gradual disillusion-and dissolution-mirrors his country's dramatic lurch from euphoria to despair.
At once loving and sharp-edged, tender and brave, Black Earth City reveals a world and a woman as they open up to life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Hobson, a British-born descendant of White Russians, first planned the trip that forms the basis of this memoir, she thought she was traveling to the Soviet Union. But a month before her departure in 1991, a failed right-wing putsch in Moscow consigned that destination to the pages of history and ushered in the dawn of a "New Russia." Some 500 kilometers south of Moscow, in the provincial university town of Voronezh that is to be Hobson's home for the next year, a political and economic lethargy muffles the cataclysmic events of the capital. For most of the residents of Hostel No. 4, where the author takes up quarters, there is little novelty in the "new" Russia. Heavy drinking, escapist plots and extravagant romances are marks of the national psyche, as they have since well before the revolution (first and second). Yet for Hobson, even the time-honored tradition of drinking vodka on a commuter train is an adventure, and she treasures the details of an exotically mundane life. And while her title may nod to at least a modest political account, her well-groomed diary is unapologetically concerned more with Hobson and company's new independence than with Russia's. While many of the vignettes are amusing and the characters often charming, the narrative already feels dated after all, even sleepy Voronezh has abandoned the Soviet trappings that Hobson describes, if not the wild nights she remembers so fondly.