Being Grounded in Love

Leo Tolstoy claimed that all happy families resemble one another; many in the West believe that all Russians are equally miserable. Maria (Gruzdeva) Shelyakhovskaya's Being Grounded in Love: A History of One Russian Family, 1872-1981 challenges both such simplistic notions. Being Grounded in Love "is a conscious effort to look at and grasp the meaning of the tumultuous one hundred years of Russian and Soviet history (1872-1981) by taking an ordinary family perspective as a vantage...
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Leo Tolstoy claimed that all happy families resemble one another; many in the West believe that all Russians are equally miserable. Maria (Gruzdeva) Shelyakhovskaya's Being Grounded in Love: A History of One Russian Family, 1872-1981 challenges both such simplistic notions. Being Grounded in Love "is a conscious effort to look at and grasp the meaning of the tumultuous one hundred years of Russian and Soviet history (1872-1981) by taking an ordinary family perspective as a vantage point and reconstructing it based on the materials of a well-preserved family archive. The result is a deeply entertaining and engaging collage of personal recollections, authentic voices, intimate details, through which events of great magnitude-including multiple revolutions and wars-get illuminated in a distinctly personalized way. For sure, the ultimate result is partisan and partial, imbued with the partiality of love to one's own kin, the Gudzyuk-Gruzdev family. It is difficult to resist the feeling of compassion while reading entries of the personal diaries, the intimate correspondence of family members or listening to the collector's own voice recounting the family's itinerary through the century of troubles. Ultimately, by foregrounding love as a key motive, the book provides a story about the perseverance of human love and about the persistence of family ties as opposed to the heaviness of History."-From the introduction by Vladimir Ryzhkovski