The Mosaic of My Life
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My life began like a fairytale. Three wizards gathered around my cradle and made their predictions. Fyodor Shalyapin said that I would become a great singer. Alexandra Danilova, that I would dance like her. And professor Golubovskaya, that I would be a pianist. But none came true. In my case the role of the wicked fairy Carabosse was assumed by the epoch in which I lived. I was born in Moscow and now in my eighty-second year live in Paris, in an apartment not far from the theater on the Champs Elysées where my mother sang. Her specter swirls around the city she loved so much. It haunts me. If I put down my recollections of her on paper, it will probably appease her soul. I want to tell her that her wishes are fulfilled. Her daughter, her granddaughters are well. But without her courage, insistence, and defiance of danger none of us would have survived. She would be pleased. We’ve wrested from fate the right to lead normal lives. My mother had everything: talent, beauty, prosperity, and a happy family life. To balance all this, sufferings came that would be beyond the endurance of many women. The arrest of her daughter, the sudden death of her husband, starving in Leningrad during the siege, the hardships of the German occupation and labor camps, poverty in postwar Paris, the prospect of exile in Siberia following her return to Russia, desperate attempts to stave off this final disaster, and then death in Leningrad. We were inseparable for the first thirty-five years of my life. Then in the spring of 1948 I saw her off to Marseille, from where she was going to take a boat bound for the motherland. She never saw Paris again.
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About the Book
The Mosaic of My Life is the author’s second novel. The original Russian language edition was published in 2019. The novel has been nominated for three national literary awards in Russia which will be adjudicated in the autumn of 2020. The Mosaic of My Life covers a broad swathe of Russian history from the still ‘normal’ living conditions at the turn of the 20th century through World War I and the 1917 Revolution, the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War, to the New Economic Policy and semi-return to a market economy followed by the Great Terror, World War II and the immediate post war years. The story is based on reminiscences of people who lived through this complex historical period and, in their own words, explain their various decisions to stay or emigrate. The narrative takes the reader through several social strata from workers to high bourgeoisie, from inside the director’s box at the Bolshoi Theater to inside solitary confinement cells of political prisoners awaiting interrogation and likely execution.
About the Author
Larisa Zalesova - Doctorow is a journalist and critic who is widely published in print and internet media in Russia and Western Europe, where her articles number in the hundreds and deal with the visual arts, music and literature. All of these skills and experience were deployed to create the culturally and socially rich text of this novel. Zalesova lives in both St Petersburg, Russia and Brussels, Belgium. She is a member of the Union of Journalists of Russia and the Union of Music Critics of Belgium.