Tea at Trianon: Midcentury Life in the Soviet Union

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, April 12, 2020

Midcentury Life in the Soviet Union

From Literary Hub:

As a young woman, Tamara liked to say that she had no use for the past. She lived in a 25-square-meter room with Maria Nikolaevna and her second husband, a taciturn, disapproving man who dressed cadavers at a morgue. Their daughter, a cheerful brown-eyed girl named Lyusia, shared Tamara’s bed. At 15, Tamara began working 70-hour weeks as a seamstress and pattern maker. The long hours suited her, and the job provided a supply of good fabric and kept her away from home, where she usually ended up arguing with her stepfather.

She first noticed Vassily because he was square-jawed and trim, with a major’s boards on his shoulders and, at 32, older than the other men at the dance hall. He seemed, Tamara said, masculine yet self-effacing, one of the few men she’d met who was entirely without bluster. He had a soft, unhurried way of speaking, but what impressed her most were his manners; he didn’t kiss her until their third date. They married three months later. After she moved in, Vassily sent for his daughter from a previous marriage, a timid, brooding girl named Inna who never warmed to her stepmother. My father was born two years later, during the first winter following the war.

Tamara looked forward to going out walking with Vassily on Sunday mornings. Both were particular and vain about clothes. He wore his parade uniform and she her couture, and when they strolled arm in arm along the boulevards in the city center, they reveled in the surprised glances of Moscow’s plainer, grayer residents. Though he was often gone, Vassily sent plenty of money and arrived home with a suitcase of presents for her and the children. He was fastidious, rarely drank and never complained about taking a turn sweeping or washing dishes. Vassily didn’t speak about his job and Tamara knew not to ask. When he was away, after the children were asleep, she spent the last hours of the night reading books she bought or borrowed, by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Strindberg, Shakespeare, Balzac. Though she never enrolled in a university course, on those nights she discovered a fondness for books that never left her. (Read more.)