Anna Reid
A Very Azeri Upbringing
Days in the Caucasus
By Banine (Translated by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova)
Pushkin Press 273pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
‘We all know families that are poor but “respectable”. Mine, in contrast, was extremely rich but not “respectable” at all.’ Born in 1905 in the ancient desert city of Baku, Banine (full name Umm-el-Banine Assadullayeva) was the fourth daughter of an Azeri oil baron, and thus a member of an exotic, semi-Russified oligarch class that flourished briefly between the discovery of oil on the Caspian in the 1870s and the Russian Revolution. Emigrating in the early 1920s, she lived most of her life in Paris, where she became a well-known figure on the mid-century literary scene. Dashingly translated from the original French by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova, this is the first publication in English of her witty and wonderful childhood memoir.
Pre-revolutionary Baku was an incongruous place, its walled old town circled by Belle Epoque mansions, an opera house, a casino and the wooden derricks of the shoreside oil fields. Her and her sisters’ childhoods were split sharply in two – Westernised in the city, where they grew up under the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf
'The authorities are able to detain individuals in solitary confinement for up to six months at a secret location', which 'increases the risk to the prisoner of torture'.
@lucyjpop looks at two cases of China's brutal crackdown on free expression.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/xu-zhiyong-thupten-lodoe
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back