In our lengthy review of the Russian original of The Deserted House (TLS, February 16, 1967) we hoped “that this remarkable and superbly written little book will soon be published in English[.”] Now, six months later, we have Aline Werth’s excellent translation. Of all the “purge” books that have come here to our knowledge The Deserted House is somehow the most moving of all. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich describes the daily routine in a camp: General Gorbatov’s Years off My Life deals specifically with the Gestapo-like methods applied to the military soon after the Tukhachevsky affair. Chukovskaya tells the simple story of how the “purge” suddenly broke into the life of a perfectly ordinary, loyal and law-abiding family.

The book is tragically autobiographical. Lydia Chukovskaya was married to an eminent scientist who, like Olga Petrovna’s Kolya, was arrested in Leningrad in 1937 and shot as “an enemy of the people[.”] She did not hear of his death until much later, and went through the agony of the prison-queueing, as described in this book. The hideous NKVD hunchback was a real person – subsequently shot, like many other NKVD chiefs. Chukovskaya was a very close friend of Anna Akhmatova, whose son was also arrested in 1937, and not released until many years later. The two women did their queueing together.

Chukovskaya, though a sick and half-blind old woman, is now working on her reminiscences of Akhmatova. This book promises to be of the greatest literary and historical value, since few people knew Akhmatova as well as Chukovskaya did.