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Sandra Birdsell. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2001. 350pp. $34.99 hc.
The first page of Sandra Birdsell's The Russlander is a stark news article of 1917 which reports the massacre of eleven inhabitants of Privol'noye, a small village in Russia. The narrative that follows recreates the time straddling this tragedy during which the self-reliant Mennonites of this idyllic community become increasingly subject to invasive forces of social change and cultural persecutions in war-torn and revolutionary Russia. Although the story is told in the third person, it is clear toward the end that it is a re-telling of the memoir of Katya, the story's central figure, who escapes the massacre and subsequently emigrates to Manitoba. The written record that emerges from Katya's oral account movingly recreates the quotidian experience of her community, a perspective excluded and inadequately documented by the facts in the news article.
Apart from a few pauses in the narrative to indicate that Katya, now old and living in Canada, is telling her story to the interviewer who creates this second-hand telling, the story takes place entirely in Russia. The setting of this novel therefore marks a departure from the locus of Birdsell's traditional creative interest - the Canadian prairie. In the course of her insightful examinations of prairie culture, Birdsell has steadily developed...