The upheavals, the dramas, the political and cultural intrigues of Europe between the 19th and 20th century through the eyes of 15 relevant Russian women, who all lived at different times but were united by History’s invisible thread.

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Margherita Belgiojoso competently creates a brilliant fresco of portraits of famous Russian women. She somehow succeeds in leaving their stories open and limitless, each one leading on to the next.
Vera Figner, nicknamed the “Venus of the Revolution” because of her great beauty, who assassinated Alexander II, the reformer tsar, and after 20 years in prison fled to Switzerland where she listened to a conference by Lenin who deeply disappointed her. Then onto Aleksandra Kollontai, a Leninist revolutionary, a feminist at the heart of the Soviet movement. Then it is the turn of Matil’da Kschessinskaya, the tsar’s beloved ballerina who leads us into the grand Russian theatres where we meet a few of the characters already present in the portraits of the previous women; and then naturally the theatre impresario Diaghilev and her rival, the symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius. From writer Nina Nikolaevna Berberova, to Lili Brik, Mayakovsky’s muse, Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, we finally come up to the present day with Yelena Bonner, the dissident who with her husband, the 1975 Nobel Prize winner, was ultimately rehabilitated by Gorbachev and called back to Moscow. And who was met by a huge crowd at the station on their arrival.

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