“Marie Avinov: Pilgrimage Through Hell” by Paul Chavchavadze

Few Russian aristocrats lived through the Revolution, Stalin’s purges and the Nazi invasion. Marie Avinov did, and this is her story in her own words.

Born into privilege, Marie had a defiant streak early on: at eighteen she refused to be presented at court. Soon afterward she married Nika Avinov. Then the Revolution came, and everything they knew was swept away. For some thirty years they lived under the constant watch of the Cheka and its successors. Nika was arrested again and again, and at one point Marie won his release by going straight to Vyshinsky himself. Eventually she was deported to a small village in Central Asia, and she was still there when the German army arrived in 1941.

Her friend Paul Chavchavadze, a Georgian prince and émigré writer, shaped Marie’s diaries and recollections into this memoir. Parts of it appeared first in The New Yorker. It’s a gripping, clear-eyed record of survival through some of the darkest decades of the twentieth century, and it belongs on the shelf beside Ginzburg and Solzhenitsyn.

This 1968 Prentice-Hall hardcover is in good condition. It’s a remarkable find for history readers at Dead Tree Dreams.