Natasha's Dance joined my To Read list somewhere between 2012 - 2016. It had sat there, dormant for so long I now forget from whom came the nudge to read it. I know it came out of my having read Tolstoy though: one of those well, if you've read x then you should certainly now read y conversations.

  I enjoyed the read: the initial return to the landscapes of my 6th form history class with Peter & Catherine the Greats; an increase in understanding of the role of the peasant class & family estates which I've touched on of late via Chekhov; knowledge gained of folk customs, of Moscow vs. Petersburg; re-meeting the Big Names in culture - the composers, designers, artists, writers. Figes does an excellent job of tying it all in together. 

 Where we closed off - wanting now to read Nabakov's Speak, Memory, 

to revisit the works of Maria Tsvetaeva; 

a study on homesickness that will always chime with me: 

'From such associations the homesick exile constitutes a homeland in his mind. Nostalgia is a longing for particularities, not some devotion to an abstract fatherland.'

..........

' Like most émigrés, [Tsvetaeva] was torn between two different notions of her native land. The first was the Russia that 'remains inside yourself': the written language, the literature, the cultural tradition of which all Russian poets felt themselves a part. ... 'One can live outside of Russia & have it in one's heart,' Tsvetaeva explained... 

The other Russia was the land itself - the place that still contained memories of home. For all her declarations of indifference, Tsvetaeva ccould not resist its pull. Like an absent lover, she ached for its physical presence. She missed the open landscape, the sound of Russian speech, and this visceral web of associations was the inspiration of her creativity. '

...........

For Tsvetaeva the mirage of Russia was the fading memory of her dismantled house .. For Nabokov, in his poem 'The Cyclist', it was the dream of a bike ride to Vyra.. which always promised to appear round the next bend - yet never did.  This nostalgic longing for an irretrievable patch of one's own childhood is beutifully evoked by Nabokov in Speak, Memory (1951). To be cut off from the place of one's own childhood is to watch one's own past vanish into myth.'

'Like Tatiana in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the young poet lived in a world of books. "I am all manuscript," Tsvetaeva once said. 

....... reminding me of Michèle Roberts, 
"the self that dances around on white sheets of paper."
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Rossum's ... I'm making my way through it now. Started reading at the behest of a friend. Having come from re-visiting The Tempest, we realised we had on our hands another Miranda, at least in the style of her I.ii one liners only. Domin talks; Helena responds. Sexual assault also known as a "marriage proposal". Ten years pass. ... Not exactly riveting. 

The Kalevela ... Its name also cropped up mid-Natasha's Dance. 
The Finnish epic. It might travel with me on holiday. Just a few pages in so far.