Anna Berseneva
| Sovpadenia | Coincidences 3 Novels. AST. Moscow 2023. approx. 350 pages each |
The contemporary part of the first two books takes place in Russia (Moscow) and Belarus (Minsk, Polesie) 2019-2021. The historical part begins in 1924 in Belarus, and continues in 1926 in Algier, Paris, Moscow. The modern part of the third book is happening 2022 in Russia. The historical part (1930s-1950s) of the third book takes place in Russia (Moscow, the Far East), Belarus (Minsk, Polesie) and Germany. All plot lines are intertwined.
Vol. 3 The Golden Rhein
This novel is the concluding novel in the trilogy begun by the novels Veronica‘s Net and The Sand Rose. It can easily be read as a standalone work. The present-day portion of the action takes place from December 2021 to October 2022. Russia‘s full-scale war against Ukraine is the central event. It defines the dramatic events in the personal lives of numerous characters.
The protagonist Ada (45 years old) travels from Germany to Moscow in December 2021 to spend Christmas with her son (18 years old). After the complicated vicissitudes of his parents‘ divorce, he lives in Moscow with his father, a top manager of Russian television. The story of acquaintance and joint life of Ada and her husband (early 2000s) is given by flashbacks, which are built into the composition so that through them the characters of the heroes are revealed.
Ada is a person of peace. She is a British subject. Her father is a Frenchman of Iranian origin. Her mother is a Jewess, born in the USSR and brought to England as a teenager under unusual circumstances. Ada grew up in England and wrote her master‘s thesis on the history of Germany during World War II. Her early marriage brought her to Moscow, where she lived for 7 years, working as director of a contemporary art gallery. The year 2014 was a turning point not only for Russia, but also for her family. Working on propaganda television destroyed her husband‘s identity and led Ada to divorce him. Ada has since returned to Germany, but continues to visit Moscow, including after February 2022. She tries to convince her son to leave with her, not knowing that it is love that keeps him in Moscow.
After 7 years living in Moscow, Ada understands Russian life from the inside. However, she is not part of that life and does not try to justify those who think it is possible to ignore the war. The parallels between Hitler‘s Germany and contemporary Russia became obvious to her long before 2022. Since the outbreak of the war, she has worked extensively with Ukrainian refugees. Therefore, the contrast between Ukraine‘s massive grief and Moscow‘s absolute nonchalance makes a particularly heavy impression on her.
Both contemporary and historical events are shown in the novel through the family events and relationships of the characters past and present. Ada‘s grandfather and grandmother, as well as Ada‘s mother, had to survive the most acute dangers of the twentieth century. Some of them are described in the two previous novels of the trilogy. But the new ones turn out to be no less, and even more dramatic. They take place in 1938-1945. Ada‘s grandfather and grandmother are Sergei and Xenia. Previous events in their lives have led to Sergei‘s arrest. Ksenia went looking for him in the Gulag of the Soviet Far East. In the new novel, she finds him in a camp in Vladivostok (the one where the poet Osip Mandelstam died) and rescues him with the help of a peasant who removes the bodies of the dead from the camp. Ksenia and Sergei hide for a while in the basements of Vladivostok‘s historic urban slums. Then they manage to get on a merchant ship going to Hamburg. Once in Germany, Sergei continues his activities as a secret agent of British intelligence. He is sent to North Africa. During the Second World War, he participates in important intelligence operations in this strategic region. Before leaving, Sergei settles Xenia and their adopted daughter in a convent on a Rhine island. They were to be taken out of Germany, but this was prevented by the war, so they become witnesses and participants in the tragic events that took place on the island. To describe them, the novel uses documentary chronicles that are unknown to the general reader. The fate of loved ones later becomes Ada‘s main motivation to study the history of this period. And it also allows her to deeply understand the new war, which dramatically changed the lives of her husband, her son and her own. Irreversible changes have also occurred in the life of Igor, a native Muscovite. He and Ada save each other from the despair they both feel at having to live with a redrawn past.
Past and present events in the novel constantly intertwine and shade each other. Guilt, responsibility, and individual ways of confronting a greater evil are its central themes.
