From Sunday Times Culture supplement July 6 2008.
Christopher Hart is reviewing Owen Matthews' STALIN'S CHILDREN: Three Generations of Love and War (Bloomsbury Press)
Owen relates the cruel travails of his mother Lyudmila (Mila) Bibikov: born in Russia 1934; she survives the standard horrors: father* & mother disappear into the gulags when Mila is 3, her sister 11; finally allowed to leave CCCP in 1969, marries Russophile Mervyn Matthews and settles in London.
* Wrenching irony: Mila's father was one of those many loyal Commisars, "purged for no apparent reason."
Owen writes of Mila:
" ... still Russian to her fingertips ... ferociously witty and intelligent ... pronouncing her opinions with unfashionable certainty ... discussing books with passion, scorning Nabokov, praising Kharms, utterly at home in the dense kasbah of her country's literature ... " [my bold emphasis]
From the little I know of Daniil Kharms (I find only 3 passing mentions on the Nabokov-archives) -- his physical sufferings (eventual death by starvation) under Stalin matching, or exceeding, those of the Bibikov family -- I think I can understand her opinions. I'll await reading Owen's book before passing further comment. Mila is clearly wrong if she's "blaming" VN for escaping the fates of her parents, Kharms, and the countless artist-victims of Soviet Terror. Perhaps her "scorn" for VN is along the oft-debated lines: would a more outspoken "didactic/polemical/propagandist" approach have made VN's novels more "anti-Sovietically effective?"
What makes the debate so intractable for Brits like me born in the late-1920s: the bitter choice between communism and fascism, as it then seemed to us, under a German blitz, sharing a life-death struggle with our Red Army allies!
Stan Kelly-Bootle