How It All Began: The Prison Novel

One of the earliest and most powerful Bolsheviks (he was editor of Pravda and, in 1926, leader of the Comintern), N.I. Bukharin was best known for such texts as The Theory of Historical Materialism. Bukharin was arrested in 1937 during the Stalinist purges and forced to stand trial a year later as the last original Bolshevik. During his year of imprisonment and interrogation in Lubyanka, Bukharin wrote three ideological texts and this, an unfinished, thinly fictionalized memoir of his youth. All of these were interred in Stalin's personal archive, the ninth level of documentary oblivion, and were recovered by Cohen only in 1992. There is one chapter on Russia's roiling political situation and two fictional recreations of meetings between historical figures, but these are brief, anomalous interludes in what is really a sweet and intensely felt memoir of a petty bourgeois childhood. Like Bukharin, the main character, Nikolai (Kolya) Petrov, was the son of a loving, intelligent but perpetually unsuccessful functionary. In each incarnation of his father's life--from teacher in Moscow to civil servant in Bessarabia to unemployed supplicant to petty school official back in Moscow--Kolya enthusiastically adapts. What makes the book so touching is Bukharin's detailed cataloguing of the emblems of childhood. Everything is lovingly described: his collection of birds and bugs; the foodstuffs on a particular picnic; adored books; every small shop along a street; even an innocent, unheroic meeting of teenaged Socialist Revolutionaries. It's beautifully written and often funny, but the author's circumstances make it a poignant meditation by an imprisoned soul. (June)