History in fiction

I've just finished reading Sashenka by Simon Sebag Montefiore. It's a wonderful novel about a young St. Petersburg woman who becomes an early Bolshevik and rises to a position of comfort and security. 

Montefiore is a technically accomplished novelist; he tells his story in three sections widely separated in time: 1916-17, 1939, and 1994. 

The plotting is exquisitely intricate, maybe even too much so. The dialogue is plausible, the setting is richly detailed, and the characters are vivid: I can believe in Sashenka, and the historical characters—especially Stalin—are truly frightening. 

(A nice touch: In his walk-on role, Stalin crashes a party at Sashenka's and is absolutely charming, especially to Sashenka's little daughter. But that just makes him even more terrifying.)

Apart from being a fine novel, Sashenka is interesting because Montefiore is primarily a well-known historian of Russia. His book about Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin is brilliant, and his two-volume biography of Stalin is superb. (See my review of Young Stalin in The Tyee.)

The hazard of knowing a lot about a historical period, and then writing a novel about it, is that the facts and factoids sit there in the story like lumps in the batter. The story stops dead while the author reels off some statistics or summarizes the political problems the characters are facing...often by having the characters recite to one another what they surely know already.

Simon Sebag Montefiore adroitly evades this hazard. We see 1916 St. Petersburg as Sashenka sees it (and as she takes it for granted). The same with 1994 Moscow as seen by the young historian Katinka—who, as a girl from the Caucasus, doesn't take it for granted at all.

With hindsight, looking back at his nonfiction, I can see that Montefiore's love of gossip and anecdote reflects a born storyteller's approach to history, and those books presage this novel.

The blend of fictional and real characters is very smooth, but Montefiore doesn't beat us up with facts about them; we learn what we need to know to follow the story. No doubt Stalin spent the night of May Day 1939 somewhere, but it could have been at Sashenka's dacha, and escorted by his buddies like Beria.

So I recommend Sashenka as a good novel, but also as a kind of clinic for writers dealing with historical characters and events. Figure out how he removed the lumps from his batter, and you'll be a better novelist.