The Black Russian
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The “altogether astonishing” true story of a black American finding fame and fortune in Moscow and Constantinople at the turn of the 20th century (Booklist, starred review).
The Black Russian tells the true story of Frederick Bruce Thomas, a man born in 1872 to former slaves who became prosperous farmers in Mississippi. But when his father was murdered, Frederick left the South to work as a waiter in Chicago and Brooklyn. Seeking greater freedom, he traveled to London, then crisscrossed Europe, and—in a highly unusual choice for a black American at the time—went to Russia.
Because he found no color line there, Frederick settled in Moscow, becoming a rich and famous owner of variety theaters and restaurants. When the Bolshevik Revolution ruined him, he barely escaped to Constantinople, where he made another fortune by opening celebrated nightclubs as the “Sultan of Jazz.”
Though Frederick reached extraordinary heights, the long arm of American racism, the xenophobia of the new Turkish Republic, and Frederick’s own extravagance brought his life to a sad close, landing him in debtor’s prison, where he died a forgotten man in 1928. “In his assiduously researched, prodigiously descriptive, fluently analytical” narrative (Booklist, starred review), Alexandrov delivers “a tale . . . so colourful and improbable that it reads more like a novel than a work of historical biography.” (The Literary Review).
“[An] extraordinary story . . . [interpreted] with great sensitivity.” —The New York Review of Books
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alexandrov (Nabokov's Otherworld) exports the American dream to the cold climes of Russia in this promising but plodding tale of reinvention. Growing up on the family farm in Mississippi in the late 19th century, Frederick Bruce Thomas learned valuable lessons about business and manners, but as the child of prosperous free blacks, he also learned how to successfully negotiate social and racial boundaries. In flat-as-concrete prose, Alexandrov, a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Yale, chronicles the dogged rise and inglorious fall of Thomas as he traverses the globe in search of success. After his father is murdered by envious whites, Thomas moves from city to city, eventually shipping off from New York City for London and then Paris. There, he becomes fluent in French and serves as the personal valet to a wealthy American on the Riviera before making his way to his adopted home: Moscow. Smitten with the Russian way of life and flush with cash from various business ventures, Thomas changes his name to Fyodor Fyodorovich Thomas and petitions to become a subject of the czar. But even so deft a self-fashioner as Thomas can't escape the cataclysms of the 1910s. Though Thomas's is a fascinating and unique story, Alexandrov's tedious and lackluster telling saps the tale of life.
