PRODUCTIONS - MOVIES
Farewell to Russia
Book written by Princes Lydia Volkonsky andPrince Oleg Volkonsky
This exceptional book is a work of non-fiction, but it reads more like a historical novel.
The first two parts of "Farewell to Russia" are the autobiography of Princess Lydia Volkonsky.
The third part is written by her son Prince Oleg Volkonsky.
The first two parts (240 pages) are an eyewitness account of events from 1905 to 1946.
With the exception of perhaps the first two chapters, in which life in pre-revolutionary Russia is described,
the narrative moves fast against a broad panorama of historical events: World War I, the Russian Revolution,
the Russian Civil War, the Soviet-Polish War of 1919-20 and World War II. Nothing is fictionalized.
The events seen through the eyes of the author Lydia Volkonsky, an art-student caught in the turmoil of war and revolution in her youth,
range from Western Russia, her homeland, to Kiev, Petrograd, Warsaw, Southern Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Italy.
Lydia Volkonsky's son Prince Oleg Volkonsky, the author of the third part (which was first meant to be a short epilogue),
describes the family’s life after leaving Italy a short ly after World War Two, to start a new life in England,
and the later, emigration to the USA. The epilogue now covers events inside today's post-Communist Russia up to the year 2008,
thus spanning an entire century of history.
Princess Lydia Volkonsky never set herself the goal of commenting on the momentous historical events surrounding her, she merely describes them.
And this is the main strength of her book. She acts as an eye-witness and not as an historian. Her aim was to create a work of literature.
Her style is that of a bye-gone era - the style of the great Russian classics of the 19th century.
Her son Oleg, on the other hand, comments on histrical events extensively and brings them "up to date."
The aim of the third part is to set these events into a historical and political context.
Considerable attention is given to the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in 1917 (during his life Prince Oleg Volkonsky has known three members
of the Romanov family closely) to the subsequent Bolshevik revolution and the Civil War, World War II, the Cold War, and post-Soviet Russia’s situation in the world today.
House in Poland. Drawing
by Lydia Volkonsky. 1944
All three parts are illustrated by family photographs and by drawings and paintings by its two authors including a self-portrait by Lydia Volkonsky.
Oleg Volkonsky graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, in 1964 and has a life-long career in radio broadcasting to the Soviet Union through Radio Liberty in Munich,
the B.B.C. in London, and the Voice of America in Washington, D.C.
His father, Prince Valentine Volkonsky, was a graduate of the last class of cadets of the Russian Imperial Naval Academy during World War One.
He ended his life as an instructor for the British Royal Navy.
Oleg Volkonsky after many years of broadcasting to Russia while it was beyond the "Iron Curtain" now broadacsts worldwide in English for the new "Voice of Russia" from Moscow.
Fate, or the will of God, sometimes turns incredible cycles.
The Volkonsky family, one of Russia's most illustrious, has been the subject of many historical works as well as of fictional literature in Russia.
For example, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, hero of Tolstoy's "War and Peace", although he is a fictionalized character, is modeled on a member of the Volkonsky family
(Tolstoy's mother was a Princess Volkonsky.)
Princess Volkonsky's book "Farewell to Russia" continues the tradition.
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LIST OF MAIN PERSONAGES
Princess Lydia Alexandrovna Volkonsky (nee Rybnikov) – the author.
Prince Valentine Mikhailovich Volkonsky – her husband
Alexander Rybnikov - her father
Helene Rybnikov (de Vassal) - her sister
Michel de Vassal - friend of Valentine Volkonsky in Warsaw. Married Lydia's sister, Helene.
(De Vassal's forefather came to Russia with Napoleon's army in 1812, was taken prisoner-of-war, but decided to stay. He made a fortune in South Russia importing French vines and Marino sheep. DeVassal was an aviator during World War I.)
Vladimir Rybnikov - her brother, an officer of the Russian Army.
Valeri Rybnikov - her uncle from Kiev
Nina Rybnikov - Valeri Rybnikov's daughter and Lydia's cousin and companion in Kiev and Petrograd.
(Nina married a man called Garnitch-Garnitsky on a whim and soon divorced him. In exile, she owned a restaurant for many years called “Mayak” – “The Lighthouse” near the Russian cathedral on the rue Darue in Paris.) .
On January 7, 1989, (Christmas Day according to the Russian church calendar) excerpts were read from the book in a nationwide broadcast over Moscow Radio in a semi-dramatized version accompanied by music. The 60-minute programme, billed as a special "Christmas Show" - was the first of its kind in the Soviet Union. It was followed by an interview with the author's son, Prince Oleg Volkonsky. The programme reflected the beginnings of Gorbachev’s new era of “Glasnost.” (“Openness”).
