ANOTHER WINTER, ANOTHER SPRING: A Love Remembered

Like so many other memoirs of those who witnessed the White Russians' GÖtterdÄmmerung during the Revolution, this has an overlay of romantic melancholy that mutes horror; nonetheless the author, who wrote the first draft when ""events were still fresh in memory,"" tells her tragic story with freshness and grace. Louise, daughter of a comfortable Swedish-Danish family, married Gleb, an officer in the White Army, in 1918. Wildly in love, she followed him to an Arctic outpost over threatening but dazzlingly beautiful lands and seas. After a brief happiness, the end loomed when the Allies pulled out and the Russian commanders, who themselves escaped by icebreaker, ordered the last terrible march. Then came the surrender, the nightmare transport in box cars, imprisonment, starvation, months of despair and dogged hope. Ultimately Louise learns of Gleb's death. As the hour glass runs out, the author shores up acute moments: their horse floundering in a gale during the last retreat, ""its tail and mane tossed sideways by the wind,"" the final glimpse of Gleb ""framed within the fine old arches of the monastery."" A revolution in the land the couple loved was, they felt, inevitable; and Gleb, true to his training and values, ""accepted the bitter penalty for the sins of generations."" Personalities remain elusive, but this is a touching view of young love and the brief lives of the expendable.