A TRAIN TO MOSCOW by Elena Gorokhova - SPOTLIGHT & GIVEAWAY

In post-WWII Russia, a girl’s dream of becoming an actress can be an act of defiance.

ELENA WORDS: 

My novel, A TRAIN TO MOSCOW (LakeUnion) is based on the career of my older sister, Marina, who was a great Russian actress and to whom this book is dedicated. Although most events in the novel are fictitious, the training method Sasha experiences at the best drama school in Moscow is completely real. As a student, my sister acted in the film-opera A Tsar’s Bride and later, onstage in Leningrad, in Twelfth Night and The Dawns Here Are Quiet, just as Sasha does in the novel. 

These are pictures of Marina when she was Sasha’s age – as a child, onstage, and in film. To me, this is what the narrator of the story in the novel looks like.

Elena Gorokhova grew up in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in a courtyard that became a more accurate emblem for the Soviet life than the ubiquitous hammer and sickle: a crumbling façade with locked doors and stinking garbage bins behind them.  Like everyone else, when she was nine, Elena joined the Young Pioneers and had a red kerchief tied around her neck.  A tiny cell in the body of a Leningrad school collective, she promised to live, study, and work as the great Lenin bequeathed every citizen to do.

But she harbored a passion that grew into an un-Soviet failing: at age ten she was seduced by the beauty of the English language and spent the next eight years deciphering its secrets at Leningrad English school # 238, to her mother’s bewilderment.  

Her mother – born three years before the Soviet state – became a mirror image of her Motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave.  A front-line surgeon during WWII, she wanted her daughter to be a doctor and a builder of communism, but Elena, in her mother’s words, was “stubborn as a goat.”  What followed was the English Department of Leningrad University, a marriage to a visiting American student, and a scandal, both public and private.  

After six months of official hurdles and family turmoil, Elena left for America, a ravaged suitcase on the KGB inspector’s table with twenty kilograms of what used to be her life.  What followed was unknown, and frightening, and filled with mystery.

In the United States, Elena received  a Doctorate in Language Education and has taught English as a Second Language, Linguistics and Russian at various colleges and universities. She has also written three books. She is married and has a daughter, who is beautiful, talented and smart. And stubborn as a goat.

Thanks to Lake Union Publishing and KCC PR we have one copy to giveaway. Just tell us your thoughts about Russia. We'll choose a winner soon. Good luck.

GIVEAWAY: USA only, please