London, the winter of 1947. The entire city is covered in snow and seems outright paralyzed by the frost and – two years after the end of the War – its inhabitants still feel that they are fighting on the battlefront at home, still compelled to endure privations, the cold indoors and the rationalization of food. Albertine is the wife of Albert Whitelaw, a former combat officer currently on various secret missions in Berlin, Paris and other cities in Europe, having to frequently leave home for days on end, leaving his young beautiful wife alone, in a world to which she has not grown accustomed yet and which she still perceives as distant. Because Albertine is a Parisian, the two having met and lived together in Alexandria during the War and having moved to the capital of England after they got married.
The readers learn all these details from the very first pages of „Monsieur Karenin”, the novel published by Vesna Goldsworthy in 2018 – a book which is, at least on a certain level, a sequel to Tolstoy’s famous novel „Anna Karenina”. It is not a follow-up proper, however, but rather the novel’s projection into the future, as the writer dwells on the son of Tolstoy’s protagonist, a certain Monsieur Karenin, who arrived in London at the end of a long journey meant to save his family from the turbid events occurring in Russia after World War I. Therefore, the novel is not just (or not exactly) a fictional follow-up of one of the greatest books in world literature, but rather a metaphorical one, considering the fact that Vesna Goldsworthy’s text is also a compelling and expressive fresco of the predicament of those who, after a World War or another, are forced to go into exile, to leave their native country, sometimes abandoning their family or forsaking a much too painful past.
Interestingly enough, this up-rootedness mirrors exactly the writer’s own. Because Vesna Goldsworthy, who was born in Belgrade in 1961 and settled in England in 1986 (working at first for the BBC World Service and then at several Universities), has never stopped pondering – and writing – on exile, on alienation and on the complex relations between people arriving from different cultural spaces. Her books, from her first outstanding study entitled „Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination” (published in 1988 and regarded as one of the seminal texts on the study of European identity and of the Balkan world published in recent decades) to „Chernobyl Strawberries” (2005), explore the various attitudes of the Eastern-Europeans towards Western people. And by her novels „Gorsky” (2015) and „Monsieur Ka”, which rapidly became booksellers, she has compelled recognition, in the countries where they were translated, as a mature and profound novelist, with a gift for efficiently wielding the strategies of irony and of the fiction of atmosphere.
Convinced that the lives of the characters in her favourite books are somehow more authentic than the lives of her loved ones or of her acquaintances – because by means of the written text they last and do not fade away into oblivion as do the lives of ordinary people – Albertine, the protagonist of „Monsieur Karenin”, is drawn from the very beginning to the stories that books tell even beyond the pages proper, but also to their ability to build around the reader a kind of compensatory universe, a wonderful fictional world capable of alleviating all the suffering caused by the tough reality of life after World War II. And the fascination of the narration and the power of the life stories of the people around her are so alluring that, in order to somehow fill her boring London existence and the long days in which her husband is away, Albertine gets a job the ad of which she sees by chance. Her task is to converse in French, several hours per week, with an older gentleman, Monsieur Carr, a Russian expatriate who had arrived in the capital of England and had settled in a suburb in South West London. Little by little she will find out, to her utter astonishment, that he is none other than the son of Anna Karenina, the protagonist of Tolstoy’s novel! And gradually she will get to know in detail the entire history of the characters in the famous novel, but she will also start feeling an overpowering affection for Monsieur Carr’s son, Alexei.
Vesna Goldsworthy has evinced, ever since her first literary attempts, an amazing talent of creating, in just a few fragments, an unforgettable atmosphere, which is ever more evident in the present novel. And if in „Gorsky” the novelist drew on Scott Fitzgerald’s „The Great Gatsby” and on the glittering world of the Jazz Age, albeit symbolically transposed in twenty-first century London, „Monsieur Karenin”, with London as background as well, depicts a different universe. Here, a cold and seemingly perpetually unwelcoming city is in sharp contrast to the tranquillity and warmth that Albertine finds in Carr’s house and his stories evoking the turbulent Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century symbolically blend with Albertine’s own impressions about the rough war years and with her husband’s fragmentary accounts of the sombre atmosphere in Germany in the aftermath of the War. Listening to the recollections of Carr Senior, Albertine starts pondering on the puzzles she surmises in the very life of her husband, who does love her but is incapable of communicating with her and next to whom she can no longer find, after they have settled in London, those apparently simple ways of being truly happy that, in spite of the War, had come so effortlessly while they were living in Alexandria.
With amazing sensibility and insight, Vesna Goldsworthy depicts the big or small predicaments that all the couples in her novel are in: from Albertine and Albert, to the miserable Alexei Carr, who should be the happiest man next to Diana, his beautiful wife, and to Monsieur Karenin himself and his Tonia who, since their arrival in London – despite the fondness and warmth that they share – have become lonely and estranged from each other, albeit living under the same roof. Somehow every one of these marriages contains, in a more or less obvious way, the seed of unhappiness; and the gradual estrangement experienced by all the protagonists depicted in this novel is suggestive of Anna Karenina’s own unhappiness, of her inadequacy in a world adamant to understanding her and to accepting her for what she was and ultimately, of her final decision. Because it so happens that Albert, Albertine’s handsome husband, dies under tragic circumstances in Germany, committing suicide, which he seems to have planned a long time ago, but which no one has apparently foreseen. And the characters, from Albertine to Monsieur Karenin, are forced by the brutal circumstances they find themselves in to reflect on the moral implications of suicide. Certainly, as it often happens with contemporary texts drawing on themes or characters in canonical works of fiction, stylistic adequacy needs to be addressed. And Vesna Goldsworthy, who had not imitated Scott Fitzgerald’s style in „Gorsky” (and the idea had been an inspired one!), decided, on writing „Monsieur Karenin”, to relate to Tolstoy’s masterpiece while simultaneously keeping narrative distance from it. More precisely, in this novel there is a symbolic recurrence of certain details encountered in „Anna Karenina”, such as the motif of trains and the Thanatos symbolism they carry (for instance, Albertine’s parents and sister died in a train crash and her husband commits suicide by throwing himself under a passing train). And what remains crucial here is the meaning of up-rootedness, of departure from home, of people’s estrangement from their closest ones. And if Tolstoy’s Anna felt estranged in a society that had decided to oust her, Albertine experiences what it feels like to be a stranger in a frozen London and to feel more at home with Russian expatriates than in her own apartment. Even the most ordinary gestures, such as a hug or a formal kiss, have different meanings in different cultural universes and Albertine senses this when she hugs Alexei, filtering this intimacy through French sensitivity, British manners and Russian culture.
Moreover, Albertine is Jewish, and this detail, which she has often regarded as something alien, not thoroughly internalized, gains importance once she symbolically identifies with the eternally exiled and perpetually estranged Karenin Counts, so forlorn in England. In order to cancel the distance and to succeed in honouring her much needed intimacy with the Karenins, whom she feels so close to spiritually, Albertine starts learning Russian (let us remember that Vesna Goldsworthy herself started her literary career by writing in a foreign language!) and in order to fully integrate into this world she starts putting down, from Monsieur Karenin’s fragmentary and disparate accounts, the very story of his life, which eventually turns into a book, ‘Karenin’s Winter’, a replica of the book that Anna Karenina herself had written for her son in Russia… Vesna Goldsworthy’s novel is criss-crossed from beginning to end by doubled or reduplicated images, a character from the past is revived in a character of the present and a movie star (Vivien Leigh) is mirrored by Albertine herself – her spitting image – exactly during the screening of Tolstoy’s famous novel in 1948.
Can a human being be fully understood without taking one’s nationality into account? Can someone thoroughly express oneself in a language other than one’s mother tongue? And what happens when people see their lives shattered by wars or revolutions and they are forced to flee and start over somewhere else? Vesna Goldsworthy’s novel sub-textually articulates all these questions (as well as other ones!), but the author does not attempt to give clear-cut, conclusive answers, in her belief that questioning is what really matters. Therefore, the book is compelling by the unswerving faith – which the author shares with all her characters – in the power of the (written) word to re-create the world and to give people the courage to start over. Sometimes, life itself.
Vesna Goldsworthy, „Monsieur Karenin” (translation into Romanian by Luana Schidu, Humanitas Fiction Publishing House, Bucharest, 2020 )
Translated into English by Mirela Petraşcu
Sumar Literomania nr. 399 (2026)
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