Antanas Sileika on the train-wreck life of Stalin's daughter
Rosemary Sullivan's Stalin's Daughter is one of the most decorated — and biggest — books of the past year. The soap opera-esque story of Svetlana Alliluyeva has won three major Canadian nonfiction prizes: the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the RBC Taylor Prize and the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
The Next Chapter columnist Antanas Sileika has read Stalin's Daughter, and he joined Shelagh Rogers in the studio to discuss this powerhouse book about a woman struggling to escape from her father's dark shadow.
ON GROWING UP IN THE KREMLIN
Alliluyeva's childhood and youth fall into two periods. The first one is truly idyllic, because she's so young she doesn't understand what's going on. The first tragedy of her life happens when she's about six and a half. Her mother gets into a fight with her father, Joseph Stalin, and then her mother goes back to her bedroom and shoots herself in the heart with a pistol and dies. Stalin seems to resent his deceased wife, and he starts deporting — and in one case executing — his wife's relatives. So for poor Svetlana, people are disappearing — cousins, aunts get taken away. Suddenly, everything becomes fraught.
ON STALIN'S PARENTING SKILLS
Stalin was incredibly tyrannical, not only to the country, but to his daughter as well. She has a boyfriend, her father disapproves of the boyfriend, the man is deported to the Gulag for 10 years. She wants to study literature, and he forbids it, he says she can't be a Bohemian, she must study history. He does not permit her to lobby on behalf of somebody who's being sent away — it makes him angry if she tries to defend somebody.
ON A 700-PAGE BIOGRAPHY THAT'S A REAL PAGE-TURNER
The book was not at all what I expected. I expected a dense biography. There are loads of footnotes, there's a list of characters, it's like reading War and Peace. This all intimidated me at first, but what got me started was that I had read Rosemary Sullivan before, and I'd found that she was very comfortable to read — an easy read, in fact. And when I picked it up I found that not only is it an easy read, it's a compelling read. I knocked off these 700-odd pages in six days. It was so compelling both because of the writing, which is so great and easy, and because — what a train wreck of a life! Among all these important tyrants, it's like a Hollywood movie but they're not just murderous people, they really are murderers!
Svetlana is the star of this story, the person who breaks hearts and has her heart broken again and again. She keeps stepping into new scenes — she's like a character in search of an author, except in this case she's a character in search of another scene to destroy, as she continues to destroy herself. It's very compelling.
Antanas Sileika's comments have been edited and condensed.