The Tragic Menagerie

""I loved the spring and hated it, not knowing what I loved, not knowing what I hated."" So says Vera, the adolescent narrator of Zinovieva-Annibal's turn-of-the-century collection of semi-autobiographical stories, first published the year she died, 1907, in her native Russia. In her introduction, Costlow lucidly contextualizes the author's tumultuous, unconventional life. Zinovieva-Annibal's identity as a rebellious, misunderstood woman is plausible subtext for these nine interconnected tales recounting a Russian childhood as a kind of domestic bestiary. Wildly ambivalent, reckless and tortured by the apparent injustice of nature as it uneasily coexists with culture, young Vera struggles through the antipodal emotions that characterize her childhood, shuttling between her home in Northern Russia and boarding school in St. Petersburg. She questions the existence of God, passes through an intense phase of piety, doubts the humanity of her peers and ultimately settles for fits of self-loathing: ""I'm the guilty one, for everything and everybody and always."" Seeking comfort in her family's menagerie of farm animals, she finds a world in which death strikes without reason or warning. Beloved bear cubs, cranes and donkeys all die prematurely, and for a child, the systemic chaos in which she lives can be overwhelming. When the author resorts to hyperbolic, florid expressions to describe her heroine's bewilderment, the tone becomes antiquated. Though marked simultaneously by flat characterizations and melodramatic excesses, the book nonetheless offers a unique glimpse into one imaginative, troubled Russian childhood a near-century ago. (Mar.)