The Secret City

by Hugh Walpole

Sent out to Russia by the Foreign Office in 1916, Jerry Lawrence and Henry Bohun find themselves unlikely travelling companions. Bohun, an immaculately dressed man who holds himself in high regard as a poet, feels the force of destiny to be a 'great man'; Lawrence appears a rough and ready character.
On arrival in Petrograd, they are drawn into the destructive and complex relationships of the Markovitch family, with whom Bohun has taken lodgings. As the build-up towards revolution increases, Bohun's passions are stirred by one of the Markovitch sisters - a situation which seems destined to cause trouble when their uncle Semyonov, who has powerful political connections, turns up at Christmas.
Set at the time of the Russian Revolution, this novel draws on Hugh Walpole's own experiences as a newspaper correspondent, and was first published in 1919.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Russia, Classics, Literary Fiction

446 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole was an English novelist. A prolific writer, he published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, his high profile as a lecturer and his driving ambition brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. A best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, his works have been neglected since his death.

Reviews

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"One's private life is always with one..... it is a secret city in which one must always live, and whose gates one will never pass through, whatever may be going on in the world outside."
The characters in this novel get their lives all tangled up with the Russian Revolution, which becomes almost incidental to what goes on between them.
It is beautifully, carefully written, with a real flavour of Russia as we see it in the works of Dostoievsky - the pity, the despair, the elation, the love. And the descriptions are superb - you can feel the snow crunch under your boots, you can hear the ice cracking on the Neva, and see the colours of the winter night sky.
Here is a flavour of Walpole's ability to create an image - they are acting a French farce when the Revolution has just begun -
"I pitied and admired the actors, spontaneous as a rule, but now bravely stuffing any kind of sawdust into the figures in their hands, but the leakage was terrible, and the sawdust lay scattered all about the stage."
I can't see why Walpole is so out of fashion, this is an excellent book. I certainly do not intend to curtail my Walpoling activities.

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Capuchin Classics publ.2012 foreword by Bridget Kendall
Written by an English writer living in Russia in at the time of the Russian Revolution, the novel wonderfully depicts gentry life in St.Petersburg (Petrograd) as the Revolution approaches and then unfolds in its earliest days. His familiarity with the ethos of the city, its topography, its mythic qualities are impressive, as is his knowledge of Russian expressions. The style and content could place the novel in the tradition of Tostoy and Turgenev. In this sense it is an intimate portrait of a family with all its drama, but it is also a fascinating portrayal of the earliest hints and realities of Revolution in its earliest days through the eyes of the Russian characters and their English friends. The narrative device is of a story told by a sympathetic outsider, showing what he himself has observed and what he claims to have learned from reports of the other characters. He professes to be outside the story, but he is a character in his own right, and interacts with the characters and the plot development.
Bridget Kendall’s Preface asks, “How do you make sense of revolution when you are in the midst of it? Hugh Walpole’s answer was to allow us to see it the way he and his friends did, as a surreal backdrop to ordinary life until the simmering unrest turned to violence and it could be ignored no longer.” She concludes, “In some ways his novel is also a lament: the cozy, lamplit, bourgeois world of pre-Revolutionary Russia which Walpole describes so affectionately was about to vanish forever.” p.13


[Bernard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published one hundred years ago, this is the sequel to "The Dark Forest".

Perhaps Walpole's best book, it is set in the Russia of the Revolution period.

A sequel that is even better than its predecessor, the author uses the time he spent in the Russia of this period to spin a memorable tale.

[Anton Segers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een blijkbaar wat uit het oog verloren schrijver herontdekt.
Een roman over enkele Engelsmannen en hun band met de Russische bevolking in het Petrograd van rond de revolutie in 2017. Soms wat expliciet en uitgesponnen, maar geschreven met veel eerlijkheid, aandacht en liefde voor de Russische ziel, uitgedrukt in enkele prachtige portretten die je bijblijven. Simpel, rechtuit, heldere, pretentieloze literatuur. Op zoek naar meer van Walpole!

[Roosje De Vries · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bespreking volgt!

[Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd never read any Hugh Walpole and bought this book on a whim because the scenario is St. Petersburg at the time the Revolution begins and, well, because I liked the cover.

I enjoyed the book very much. But I was uncertain exactly what I was reading. There are, in a way, two novels going on side-by-side. One is a novel in which the the beginnings of the Revolution, the very edge of things before tremendous change, is the protagonist. And this was very interesting, indeed, from the absolute quiet of the city, the indifference (Oh, that's a little thing going on across the river. . .), the incursion of change through marches and then violence, the merger of the times of old and new orders, the involvement of people in events when the whole basis of their lives was to change, etc. I thought, however, that the portentous image of the Neva River as a metaphor for lurking disaster and dinosaurish conquest was overdone, melodramatic, and just plain dull.

The second novel is about the narrator and the Markovitch family. Here there are three narrative threads. Vera's love; Nina's confusion; and the odd, awful playing out of the cat and mouse game between Nicolai and Uncle Andrei. The first two, in particular the first, were the most interesting. The third was leading up to a foregone conclusion shadowed in an earlier part of the book. It was not psychologically well enough done to hold my interest deeply. If one views the two men as one entity, however, one can appreciate the relationship between the two halves without expecting a great deal more development of each of the two characters. (I thought the younger of the two English boarders was the interesting one as he changes so greatly, and his youth is so well portrayed.)

Again in this book, as I saw in The Generations of Winter by Vasilii Aksyonov, there are connections between non-Russian westerners and Russian literature. In "Generations", a westerner judges Russians by his knowledge of the literature. In Walpole's book, a westerner is accused at least twice of Dostoyevskian attitudes. This is interesting - the use of Russian literature as a gauge for knowing a country or person.