>>PREVIEW
OLGA’S STORY
Stephanie Williams
Doubleday Canada, 368 pp.
"Every family has a story to tell," says Stephanie Williams. True, but not every family has a story as extraordinary as the one told by Williams in Olga’s Story.
Before writing the book, the Canadian-born Williams was a journalist who covered architecture and design for more than 20 years. During her childhood, her grandmother Olga was a fascinating and mysterious figure, seemingly the product of a different world and different experiences. Williams gradually became intrigued with just who this woman really was. Then one day, apparently in a fit of dementia, her grandfather burned almost all of his and Olga’s history, including papers and photographs.
At that point, it occurred to Williams that more than just memories might have been lost in the fire. "I decided that this story, if I could crack it, would be the best story I had ever gotten," she says.
Her book follows Olga’s life as a young girl in turn-of-the-century Siberia. Her father, a successful tradesman, was able to give his family a comfortable existence, where education, superstition, peasant life and the bordering Mongolian culture blended together. Then a shadow fell across Russia, as the First World War and the revolution of 1917 came quickly, dividing the country. Before long, Olga’s father, seeing only further hardship ahead, sent his daughter off to China. From there, another story begins – again involving revolution, and the hardship that accompanies the perpetual immigrant.
Williams began her research shortly after perestroika in the 1980s, when it became possible to travel to the remoter regions of Siberia. At first she’d considered writing a travelogue, but upon returning home, she found she’d come across a bigger story than she’d realized.
"Suddenly a whole new world had been opened up for me," she says. "I didn’t yet have enough, there were too many unanswered questions."
Her research continued sporadically until the advent of the Internet made it easier to undertake. As well, for a mere $100, a St. Petersburg researcher turned up a wealth of information.
"She found all of Olga’s brother’s military records, Olga’s school records… and birth certificate," says Williams. "The town she had grown up in, Kyakhta, had a local newspaper, and I started reading that. Slowly, a community started to emerge."
Kyakhta was a wealthy town in one of the remotest parts of the world, where both rich merchants and intellectual exiles commingled. "The wealthy merchants were greedy for some of the class that the exiles carried with them," says Williams. "They really valued education. They set up a library, the third girls’ school to be opened in Russia and a newspaper."
The research uncovered a remarkable account of someone who had been fated to live through some of the most intense periods in the 20th century.
"Olga’s experience was that of the tens of thousands of Russians lost in history," says Williams. "It’s very difficult to find a coherent account of that particular exodus out of Russia. We’re used to reading about the wealthy émigrés who pitched up in Paris. But what happened to people coming east is largely untold."
The sections involving Olga’s life during the Bolshevik revolution are sorrowful and harrowing, as one would expect – this isn’t the romantic revolution of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World. Williams’s narrative doesn’t try to delve into the revolution’s political complexities, and the reader is left with the impression that, for many, the bloody results of the civil war were horror enough. This, as well as the butchery of the First World War, would eventually be followed by, in Joseph Brodsky’s words, "the most monstrous human epoch of our time" – Stalin’s regime.
There’s a novelistic flourish that drives the revolution scenes, as well as others in the book – something that Williams is surprised to hear.
"I thought it might have to be a novel, because I couldn’t get enough information," she admits. "But then, after doing a rigorous outline of the book, it just came out as non-fiction. What I wanted to paint was a portrait of her life as it was lived… rather than a dry biographical account." That was, she felt, "a better way to bring the reader into a difficult era."
Williams re-creates that era with skill. Equal parts memoir, history and adventure, Olga’s Story is the tale of one of those countless people who have had lives marked by upheaval, but who, in the end, managed to find a measure of peace. |
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