Once upon a time, on a beautiful day in 1937, there was a girl watching from a hill. German squadrons were flying so low I could even read their registration numbers. and their emblem, a black cross, slaughtered a small distant city called Guernika. A few months later, the same girl boarded two ships with hundreds of her friends; To France on the steamship ‘Havana’ and then to the Soviet Union on the coal ship ‘Sontay’. escape from his irresistible advance Francoist troops. She was welcomed as a hero in the country where her elders called her the paradise of the world, she grew up, became a woman, and even fell in love.
The same war that forced him to flee his homeland trapped him once again; this time not in the port of Santurce between Mount Archanda and the Cantabrian Sea, but in majestic Leningrad, among the dark and cold waters of the Gulf of Finland. and the frozen surface of Lake Ladoga. Who is that girl Survived historical events such as the murderous Nazi siege of the second Soviet cityIt refers to the person who barely managed to escape the pressure of the same Hitlerite troops in southern Russia the following year. Teresa Alonso. He lives on the border between the Clot and Guinardó neighborhoods of Barcelona, in the midst of health problems, approaching his century of life and, as the author describes it, “concentrating” in his personality “the emotion of a whole century”. Celia Santos in her novel ‘The Girl from Russia’ (Ediciones B). Published just over a year ago, the work recalls this girl’s life and adventures from the Basque war in Stalin’s Soviet Union to her return to Spain via the port of Castellón in the second half of the 1950s.
‘The Girl From Russia’ The dazzling, agile story that grips you from the first lines. Teresa’s life is a collection of thousands of adventures, and each episode is enough not only to write one chapter, but also to create numerous spin-off novels derived from the original plot. She is sensitive when describing the time the little girl spent in different Soviet reception institutions in Kiev and Crimea, where Spanish babies lived privileged lives by the standards of the country and the time. He becomes tender when he remembers the romance between Teresa and the great love of his life, an airman named Ignacio. Thats OK tense and dizzy, when it considers the climactic moment represented by the evacuation of the besieged city in a night convoy across the frozen surface of the Leningrad lagoon until they reached territory under Soviet control. And when Teresa stops the story before landing in Spain again, it leaves you wanting more.
Besides all these virtues, ‘The Girl From Russia’ has an additional incentive: truthfulness. For people who have lived in Russia for a long time, reading novels or watching films set in the land of the former tsars is often a discouraging exercise because the descriptions and settings are not always quite accurate. Before going any further, we will discuss the critically acclaimed film ‘Doctor Zhivago’, which was shot in Spain in 1965 upon the veto of the Soviet authorities. Not being able to convey the emotion of the story to the audience It is known in the latitudes of northern Eurasia. These snowy mountains of the Moncayo Mountain Range or the bare plains of the Castlla winter could never represent the Ural mountains or the Siberian steppes. However, this age of the Internet allows one to travel without lifting one’s ass from the chair, and Santos, with great care and great sensitivity, manages to describe scenarios, landscapes and situations that one cannot see in person. Part of the novel was prepared during the covid epidemic. In short, it is a highly recommended book in this period when Russia and Stalinism are under the spotlight again.
Source: Informacion
Brandon Hall is an author at “Social Bites”. He is a cultural aficionado who writes about the latest news and developments in the world of art, literature, music, and more. With a passion for the arts and a deep understanding of cultural trends, Brandon provides engaging and thought-provoking articles that keep his readers informed and up-to-date on the latest happenings in the cultural world.