‘Red Princess,’ a life of contrasts
The title «Red Princess» is a catchy one and an apt oxymoron that encapsulates the contrasts of an event-packed life. Princess Sofka Dolgorouky was born to an aristocratic family in St Petersburg in 1907. As the 1917 Russian Revolution brought the czarist regime to a violent end, she fled with her family to the Crimea. Her subsequent trajectory – which ended in England where she became a militant member of the Communist Party – included a period of internment by the Nazis at Vittel, in Vichy, France. It was a life lived to the limit, for the red princess was no mere bystander at some of the world-shaking events that helped shape 20th century history. Instead she was an active participant – writing, working with the French Resistance and forever rebelling in her personal life against social and sexual constraints on women. Headstrong and passionate, she lived life as she saw fit, ignoring the demands of convention. And she wrote throughout her life about what she did and felt and thought. Ten years after her death, her granddaughter and namesake, Athens-based author Sofka Zinovieff, looked more closely at a diary her grandmother had given her, and was prompted to explore further. The process of research and her own response to her discoveries are part of the compelling story of «Red Princess – A Revolutionary Life,» published by Granta. The book is being translated into Greek for Livanis Publications. Zinovieff’s earlier work, «Eurydice Street,» based on her experience of settling into Athens with her Greek husband and their children, was published by Granta and in a Greek translation by Dioptra. It was also translated into Dutch and Turkish and was listed on the New York Times 2005 list of 100 Notable Books. Kathimerini English Edition asked Zinovieff about «Red Princess.» As your research turned up so much new information about your grandmother, how did your view of her evolve? It was amazing getting to know her as a younger woman and seeing the difference between her somewhat cynical, ironic view as an aging grandmother and her very emotional, often contradictory self when younger. Sometimes it was very hard realizing that she had behaved «badly,» particularly in relation to her three sons – it was that that bothered me much more than anything else. But in the end, I understood that she was just an extreme version of the paradoxes which exist in most people’s lives – certainly for most interesting people. Perhaps we all want a Hollywood version of «goodies» and «baddies» in life, but I think that moral blurring and contradictions are closer to reality and more worthwhile as subjects. You include yourself in the book. What advantages and disadvantages did that present? It was such a personal odyssey that it would have been quite hard to cut myself out entirely. I didn’t think the subject was one that invited an objective, scholarly approach, and it suited me to throw myself in emotionally and see what happened. The disadvantages were that sometimes I almost felt I was taken over and haunted by my grandmother. I suppose I also had to watch out not to put too much of myself in, although often I just wanted to tell the story rather than write about my reactions to it or experiences in uncovering it. Was there any tension between the desire to tell it all and the desire to preserve privacy, either your own or that of other family members and connections? Of course. I think that this is one of the hardest things when writing about people who are alive. You have to be respectful, and I was always prepared to leave things out if someone mentioned that it was private. However, you also have to be true to your writing and while I was actually writing I didn’t think about reactions – that came later – I just went ahead in the way that seemed right and appropriate. I feel that I was true to myself and my version of the truth, and although a couple of people found certain things difficult, I don’t think that I was unfair or revealed too much. Your grandmother lived through and participated in some of the most extraordinary events of the 20th century. Did your view of those events undergo a change as you saw them from her perspective? Yes. There were many things that I began to see from the perspective of individuals rather than as mass history and that was wonderful. For example, learning more about what happened to specific people during the Russian Revolution – the daily grind, the importance of poetry and books even when there wasn’t enough to eat and terror lurked around every corner. Also learning more about my grandmother’s second husband, Grey Skipwith, and his death during World War II with the RAF. I began to imagine what those young men really went through up in the planes over Germany, and started to identify with them rather than just thinking of the stereotypes and objectified pictures I had from history books or war films. I was incredibly moved by that. Your approach to the story suggests to me that you had a wide readership in mind, if not an eventual cinema audience. How difficult was it to strike a balance between the demands of a rigorously documented account and a gripping story? I didn’t ever really imagine the readership – I just wrote in the way that made sense to me, and focused on the aspects that I found interesting. There never seemed to be a conflict between documents and the story – though making the choice of what goes in and what is left out is obviously fundamental to a book like this. Someone else might have emphasized the political history more, for example, whereas I was very interested in my grandmother as a woman – her rejection of conventional domestic life, her mistakes as a mother, her version of «free love,» her experiences as an exile. I agree about the cinema though. When I first wrote an outline for the book, I found I was visualizing it all as a film and had to start again and make it more book-like. I have written a small treatment for a film and live in hope that, one day, there might be a film. You are a researcher by training, and apparently also by choice. In both «Eurydice Street» and «Red Princess» you work with factual material. Have you ever been attracted to writing fiction? I would love to write fiction one day, as it is the genre that I most enjoy reading. I think it is also probably the hardest thing to do well. So it’s a battle between my fear of doing it badly and my desire to try and I hope that the latter will win at some point. However, I love the research part of writing a book and I think that even if I wrote fiction I’d enjoy basing it on something factual, which involved research. What are you working on now? Since finishing «Red Princess,» I’ve been doing lots of smaller projects – articles, book reviews, a section for a guidebook on Athens – which has been very good for calming down after the «grand passion» of bringing together a book. I’m hoping to return to Greek subjects for my next book, but it’s still too vague to talk about in public.
