ONLY ONE YEAR

by Svetlana Alliluyeva ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 1969

How happy I am not to be there any more."" This about sums up the Only One Year which Madame Alliluyeva has spent in this country since her abrupt departure from Russia unsuspected even by her children. One of them, her daughter Katie, she describes as ""open, artless,"" which would certainly once again apply to this expansive, retrospective testimonial which is twice as long as Twenty Letters and often as formless, shuttling from the present to the past. The opening section is the strongest, dealing with the death of the Indian Communist Singh (with whom she had lived for a year and a half) and her departure for India with his ashes. There, during the reflective and restorative weeks of life on ""another planet"" she reached the decision to leave for a still freer country and the period she's spent here, with kind friends and custodians of her books, is certainly less interesting. However throughout there are insets on the past earlier described: what Schlesinger called (in reference to her Twenty Letters) ""her filial piety"" seems to have lessened -- Stalin now leaves her ""numbed with horror"" just as at all times she contrasts him with the gentle, saintly Singh and contrasts Russia with America and its limitless freedom (certainly none of the uglier tensions seem to exist). The book has of course its historical value -- amplifying here and there on figures from the regimes of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Suslov-Kosygin -- but its intellectual content is as unincisive as its unindividuated prose.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1969

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1969

Categories: NONFICTION