While he skips centuries, bypasses reigns, selects periods for dramatic color, it often seems that Rutherfurd has indeed embraced all of Russia. Old structures are under repair, reinforcing another of Rutherfurd's themes - spasmodic renewal through Russia's ancient religions.

Only the old monastery gives signs of rebirth. Run-down buildings and feeble industry abound.

And nearly everything else in Russka shows the price. The ancestral home of the new Moscow entrepreneur, Sergei Romanov, whose family once served the aristocratic Bobrovs, still stands the underclass has finally prevailed in Russia. Paul Bobrov, the American computer salesman whose noble family once owned Russka and its farms, finds only the foundation outline of his grandmother's house on the hill the old order has been erased. Rutherfurd leaves the village 760 pages and 18 centuries later, in the year 1990, as two descendants of families we've seen living in Russka off and on for at least 1,000 years return to their roots. Immediately he forecasts one of his themes - ethnic violence and plunder - with the kidnapping of a 5-year-old boy by Scythian horsemen who raid villages to seize future warriors. 180 as a nameless hamlet of three Slavic families engaged in primitive farming and happy polygamy. It lies, he says, on the banks of the River Rus in the Ukraine, close to the Dnieper and 300 miles above the Black Sea. There are at least 18 towns, islands or sand spits in the Soviet Union beginning with names like Russka, but Rutherfurd's is an imaginary village. His subtitle announces 'The Novel of Russia.' Rutherfurd's debt to James Michener may be large, but pride wins. After the success of 'Sarum,' his 1987 first novel tracing England from the Ice Age to Margaret Thatcher, he now offers a new fiction with an entire nation as its main character. From Russia's dawn and the cruel Tatar invasions to Ivan the Terrible and the wild Cossacks, from Peter, Catherine and the days of War and Peace to the drama of the Revolution and the extraordinary events of today - here is Russia's story in a spellbinding novel - history recreated with breathtaking detail and passion.What's impressive about 'Russka' is Edward Rutherfurd's audacity - and his erudition. Through the life of a little town east of Moscow in the Russian heartland, Edward Rutherfurd creates a sweeping family saga from the baffling contradictions of Russia's culture and her peoples - bleak yet exotic, brutal but romantic, land of ritual yet riddled with superstitious fears. In this vast and gorgeous tapestry of a novel, serf and master, Cossack and tsar, priest and Jew are brought together in a family saga which unrolls through centuries of history to reveal that most impenetrable and mysterious of lands - Russia.

Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, Industrial processes Reference, Information & Interdisciplinary subjects

Hong Kong Golden Dragon Books 2022-2023.

Russka novel