The Russians

It all started when…

My father, some 30 years ago, sat me down once and passed on to me his love affair with Russian books.

There were two that he mentioned in particular - Doctor Zhivago and War and Peace.

Dad set me off on a slow literary journey but a journey nevertheless. I read War and Peace in 1988 while on a lonely sojourn into Auckland pursuing a doomed-to-failure business idea. When things are tough, and one is on his own, he reads deep.

I then came across a copy of The Cossacks while in a Pakistan backpackers on my big 1999 Asia over-lander, and I finally got around to Dr Zhivago in 2000.

BBC Radio 4 serialised Life and Fate back in 2010. I still have those episodes sitting on an old iPod, and sometimes I fall asleep to an episode or two.

But the book itself - I turned to it this year - it is dense, heavy, soaking in blood and sweat and humongous history. A twentieth century history that was ending about the time I was being born. A book unknown to the West until I was a university student in the early 80's.

This isn't book club material - unless it is one of those that meets every six months. This is a book for a minds prepared to drink deep a history that is darker in some ways than any dystopia can ever be - because humankind has already been there.

Life and Fate is the War and Peace for the 20th Century. To think that the Soviet regime nearly succeeded in burying the book for ever.

I have two sets of people to thank - those smugglers of literary truth, and my curiously world-romantically minded father.