In post–World War II Russia, a girl must reconcile a tragic past with her hope for the future in this powerful and poignant novel about family secrets, passion and loss, perseverance and ambition.
In a small, provincial town behind the Iron Curtain, Sasha lives in a house full of secrets, one of which is her own dream of becoming an actress. When she leaves for Moscow to audition for drama school, she defies her mother and grandparents and abandons her first love, Andrei.
Before she leaves, Sasha discovers the hidden war journal of her uncle Kolya, an artist still missing in action years after the war has ended. His pages expose the official lies and the forbidden truth of Stalin’s brutality. Kolya’s revelations and his tragic love story guide Sasha through drama school and cement her determination to live a thousand lives onstage. After graduation, she begins acting in Leningrad, where Andrei, now a Communist Party apparatchik, becomes a censor of her work. As a past secret comes to light, Sasha’s ambitions converge with Andrei’s duties, and Sasha must decide if her dreams are truly worth the necessary sacrifice and if, as her grandmother likes to say, all will indeed be well.
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Elena Gorokhova’s A Train to Moscow is a marvelously complex love story set against the harsh realities of Soviet life in the 1950s and 1960s. Gorokhova knows that life intimately—the settings are filled with details that will ring absolutely true to anyone who spent time on the cold side of the Iron Curtain—and she knows, just as well, the intricacies of the human heart. A cast of memorable characters, a perfectly drawn background, fascinating historical scenes—all of it in service of a story that will hold the reader from first page to last. This is a remarkable achievement, not only for a first-time novelist but for any novelist. I truly enjoyed it.
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Roland Merullo, author of A Russian Requiem and From These Broken Streets