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Memories of a Party Elite Girlhood
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20258 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1992 |
2,482 Words |
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Richard Lourie
Richard Lourie is the author of Sakharov: A Biography. |
MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS
Elena Bonner, translated by Antonina W. Bouis
New York: Knopf, 1992
349 pp., $23.00
Elena Bonner is best known in America as a champion of human rights in the former Soviet Union and as the wife of physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov. The two of them fought side by side for years, enduring attacks by the official press, threats against her children and grandchildren (who ultimately had to emigrate to the United States), and six years of exile in the closed city of Gorky. Gorbachev allowed them to return to Moscow and normal life, but not until he had been in power for close to two years--yet another case where he acted too slowly.
In the late eighties, Bonner suffered two great losses. Her mother died in 1987, and, two years later, the great love of her life, Andrei Sakharov, succumbed to various illnesses that had been only aggravated by the stress he had suffered during his exile, including frequent force-feeding when he was on hunger strikes. Bonner has remained active, traveling and speaking extensively, never the least shy about making her opinions known, and castigating both Russian and Western leaders when she finds them lacking in courage, vision, or morality. Still, there is something about the shock of endings that sends the mind back to the beginning, to the remote and fabled kingdom of childhood.
What Bonner has essentially written in Mothers and Daughters is a memoir of her first fourteen years, between her birth in 1923 and the terrible years of 1937 when her parents were arrested. She does not, however, maintain a strict chronology, both beginning her account in the present and thereafter flash-forwarding often. To Russians and those familiar with Russian literature, her title Mothers and Daughters will inevitably bring to mind Ivan Turgenev's great nineteenth-century novel of generational clash Fathers and Sons. The generations would clash again in the twentieth century, but in Soviet Russia there would be other factors that would complicate the situation greatly.
'Firstness' Of Childhood
Every childhood has two aspects, the eternal and the particular. Certain things about childhood are unchanging and can be recognized no matter the culture in which they take place. There is the essential firstness of childhood . . . first
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