Earlier this week, I had a chance to hear Dr. Margaret Paxson present a book talk at Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center about her study of life in a Russian village, entitled Solovyovo. I had met Dr. Paxson in Moscow, where she was selecting Russian academics to come to America. We had an interesting lunch discussion, where she expressed some skepticism of the prevalent view in the West that the 1990s reign of the oligarchs had been a necessary stage in the transition from Communism to Capitalism. It was a perspective that I had heard from Russians, but not often from Americans. So, when the invitation to her book talk arrived in my email box, I made sure to attend.The event was quite interesting, because Dr. Paxson's talk was illustrated with photos of the village taken by a Washington Post photographer that looked like something from the 19th Century--men sharpening hand-scythes, women harvesting hay with wooden rakes, horses, wooden houses, piles of potatoes. The snapshots reminded me of descriptions found in Gogol's Dead Souls or Wallace's Russia on the Eve of Revolution: 1905. And also of Sholom Aleichem's Anatevka, but without his Russian Jews.
Dr. Paxson read a chapter from the book, and her intonation and style seemed very Russian--poetic, elegaic, romantic, emotional. The many Russians in the room loved every word. It was a poem to village life, the heart and soul of Russia. Although there was a little bit of academic stuff in the presentation and discussion, what Paxson has obviously done is document her love for the Russian peasantry--an eternal theme of the Russian Slavophil movement. Paxson even said she found cosmopolitan and internationalist Moscow "depressing".
It was a very Russian event, and clearly Dr. Paxson loves rural Russia very deeply. Which in these days of Russia-bashing, was a delightful and surprising thing to hear in a Washington think-tank.
