'Echoes' of History In Poignant Vignettes

Highly specific in its substance yet encompassing in its vision, Serge Schmemann's new book, Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village, is like a flash of light. It captures in an instant a jumbled collection of details in the past of a village, then slowly-fades--leaving as a general impression a sense of the history and of the prospects of Russia as a whole.

The book is a collection of interrelated anecdotes, connected in sequence by the randomizing effects of memory and passing association. While the random nature of these connections often leads the narrative in diverging directions, the author unites these threads by relating his experiences while searching for information about his aristocratic forebears in the town of Koltsovo. The inhabitant's voices, past and present, are brought into clear focus through their interactions with the author or through the letters and journal entries that they left behind.

Echoes of a Native Land follows the author's ancestors, the Osorgins, from a time of peace in Koltsovo during the reign of the last tsar to the time of their expulsion from Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. Simultaneously, it traces the history of the peasants of the village to the present day.

The progression of time throughout the book, however, is extremely loose. Consecutive stories may be separated by days or centuries. People are introduced, then left unmentioned for chapters, only to reappear years younger. The past of Koltsovo is explained from the outside in. The details create, rather than support, the image. Through their presentation--a piece here and a piece there--a full picture emerges.

This piecewise method of exploring the personal histories of Koltsovo's residents and their families has the remarkable effect of compressing time. Echoes of a Native Land is not a particularly quick read. The narrative reflects research and experience spanning 17 years of the author's life. Yet by not relating the past in chronological order, Schmemann is able to condense 200 years of history into the blink of an eye. As a whole, this compressed history expresses a sense of waste and of sadness for communism's unfortunate effects on Russia's fate and for the country's difficulties in its present attempts at democracy.

This method of time compression is effective in that it provides apersonal connection to history. The events of the past 200 years are not described as affecting faceless numbers of peasants and aristocrats but as affecting individuals with names and, occasionally, faces. At the same time, however, the book does not lose sight of the larger issues, allowing the import of the book to be more general than the isolated story of one family's experiences.

While the author's diverging and converging method of writing provides an effective impression of Koltsovo, the place, as the sum of the motivations and experiences of its people through-out recent history, the style also leads at times to confusion. The narrative requires that thereader remember earlier references to town residents and family members, several of whom have very similar names, and keep straight the times of different events, organizing them into the proper sequence.

In addition, at several times during the book, the author repeats himself or speaks in such detail about the specific actions or eccentricities of an individual family member that the narration is slowed and for a time loses sight of the larger picture that the stories are combining to form. These difficulties, however, can be overcome fairly easily.

In the end, Schmemann recognizes both the faults of tsarist Russia and the positive aspects of the communist dream. He leaves us with sympathy for the trials of the Russian countryside and with the recognition that, accustomed to changing forms of oppression and persecution, the people of a Russian village are understandably averse to individual risk. Pursuing new and uncertain methods of production, even if successful, could lead to punishment if the government's idea of what is acceptable in production again changes--all of which implies that a successful transition to democracy in Russia will be difficult atbest.

In Echoes of a Native Land, Serge Schmemann provides a unique glimpseinto a set of lives within Russia as they were affected by the Bolshevik revolution. The events of the past are presented according to theirsignificance in Koltsovo, not Moscow, and the result is a narrative that helps explain the psychological effects of communism and the feelings of a set of rural people in the face of a new political order.