Soul Survivor

Another Beauty, by Adam Zagajewski (Farrar, Straus, 215 pp., $23)

I RECENTLY saw the film East-West with a friend who grew up in Communist Romania. The film is based on the actual experiences of some Russians who fled their country for France during the 1917 revolution and accepted the invitation from a supposedly more open Soviet government to return after the Allied victory in World War II. In the film, the friendly invitation turns out to be a fraud; the émigrés are brutally treated and soon learn the truth of the police state they cannot now escape. Not long into the screening my friend was weeping and nudging me with whispered comments. I remember, she said, recalling her own experience under a Soviet-dominated regime. It was like that. Yes, they were like that.

CI

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Carol Iannone

Carol Iannone writes on literature and culture.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Romania

Another Beauty, by Adam Zagajewski (Farrar, Straus, 215 pp., $23)

I RECENTLY saw the film East-West with a friend who grew up in Communist Romania. The film is based on the actual experiences of some Russians who fled their country for France during the 1917 revolution and accepted the invitation from a supposedly more open Soviet government to return after the Allied victory in World War II. In the film, the friendly invitation turns out to be a fraud; the émigrés are brutally treated and soon learn the truth of the police state they cannot now escape. Not long into the screening my friend was weeping and nudging me with whispered comments. I remember, she said, recalling her own experience under a Soviet-dominated regime. It was like that. Yes, they were like that.