Simon Sebag Montefiore's Blog

My latest novel is called One Night in Winter. It starts with the deaths of two schoolchildren in Moscow 1945 and expands into a secret police case, directed by Stalin himself, to find out what really happened to these children and their friends. It's set around the most elite school in Red Moscow. But the arrests of many children expose the hidden world of families and marriages unveiling forbidden love affairs and family secrets in a country when such mistakes can be punished by death. The schoolgirl Serafima, one of my heroines, describes this as 'Edith Wharton with the death penalty." Ultimately the book is about Love - family love, youthful romance, adulterous affairs. So though this is a historical novel, with Stalin as a character, and a thriller with a police investigation, it is really a story about Love. Many novels about love and marriage are set in Hampstead or Manhattan but the advantage of setting it in Stalin's inner circle in Moscow is that the risks, the stakes, the jeopardy is much higher: the prizes are the same but the costs can be death itself. I often write books about power - such as my books on 'Catherine the Great+Potemkin' or 'Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar' or even 'Jerusalem' but above all, I love to write about private lives, families, and their secrets. My last novel 'Sashenka' was about this too and was also set in Russia and I just loved writing this new novel.... In that book, the parents must save the children. In 'One Night in Winter', it is the children who can save or destroy their parents. Imagine if your children were arrested, what secrets would they reveal about you? Even though it has some real historical characters, my great pleasure was creating the leading characters, Satinov, Dashka, Serafima, Benya, I hope you enjoy them too. For me they became real, more real than anyone, as real as my own family..... Let me know what you think. yours Sebag

I have loved writing my novel Sashenka.  I have spent the last ten years writing history books on Russian rulers.   Each work was based on minute and colossal archival research in Russia:  first the biography of Prince Potemkin and Catherine the Great, and then two studies of Stalin: one on his life before the revolution  and the other a portrait of Stalin in power.  They were huge enterprises and I was lucky that I was able to find massive new amounts of material.  Throughout my researches, I was coming across fascinating fragments of people's lives that I was storing in my mind to use in a novel, whether it was the tragic stories of beautiful young women crushed in Stalin’s meatgrinder; or the stories of children lost in the tragedy of 20th Century Russia. I read about  the wealth and luxury of Russian families before the revolution; and I was struck on my travels by  the vision of  elegant streets in Tbilisi, in Georgia, with vine-entangled balconies. I visited the hideous borderland villages in the north Caucasus.  I spent many weeks in the strange enviroment of  the  Russian archives which are a world all of their own.  And all the while, I was encountering the new and strange world of the new Russian billionaires in Moscow.  All of these things in the end have contributed to this novel Sashenka.  


 


I don’t think of Sashenka as a historical novel though I have worked hard to ensure that the history is correct, from the cars that the characters drive and the soap they use, to the songs they sing.  I wanted to write an intimate family story about a woman and her children, in fact several generations of a Russo-Jewish family, who were rich before the Revolution. If the background is historical, the main characters are all invented and they are ones that matter. It is about love and family, betrayal and death, redemption and forgiveness, cold cruelty and reckless sensuality, wealth and poverty,  in the cruel Russia of the 20th Century. 


 


 In the end, its characters, especially the heroine Sashenka and her two children seemed totally real to me as if they really existed.  That is the joy of writing fiction.  I put my heart and soul into it and really it is the culmination of many years of thought and experience inside and outside Russia. I hope you enjoy it.



Get more on Simon Sebag Montefiore at SimonandSchuster.com