Booth Tarkington, who twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1919 and 1922, wrote the Introduction to the original edition of my grandmother’s memoir, Upheaval. Upheaval was originally published in 1932, some four years after my grandparents migrated to America. I often wondered how it was that my grandmother would have known such a celebrated writer in such a short period of time.
Earlier this year I moved to a new apartment and I am still unpacking and making new discoveries. One of these discoveries was a letter written by Elizabeth Stanley Trotter (wife of William Henry Trotter of Philadelphia). Their daughter, also Elizabeth but known as Betty, was the secretary of Booth Tarkington. I know my grandparents lived in Philadelphia and, although I haven’t as yet discovered how my grandmother knew the Trotters, I do remember the name Betty Trotter being mentioned throughout my childhood.
It appears that somehow Tarkington agreed to read my grandmother’s manuscript and gave it high praise indeed. In this letter he is quoted as saying, he had “got more about what had happened from the manuscript, and could see it more clearly, than from anything of the much he’d read about Russia since the Revolution; that there was a vividness about it that reached him and that it should be published.” I can only imagine how pleased and excited my grandmother would have been when she read this letter.
In his Introduction Tarkington continues to praise my grandmother’s writing stating, “her narrative seems to me so revealing and so alive and so eminently readable that I could not, if I would, refrain from saying that it ‘should be read’ by everyone interested in history and in human beings.” A bit further along he asserts, “No writer upon the Russian engulfment has printed a more living account of human beings who lived and perished, were heroic and gay, weak, bewildered and absurdly brave during months of a Terror vaster, crueler (sic) and closer kin to earthquake and volcano than that previously most picturesque convulsion recorded in modern history, the Terror of Marat, Robespierre, Carrier, Fouquier-Tinville and Company.”
I hope that the 2nd edition of Upheaval, with the explanatory notes I have added and the inclusion of my grandmother’s diary from 1919, as well as the correspondence she had with Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana, will only enhance the original. The Foreword for the 2nd edition has been written by Helen Azar, Historical Researcher and Author, whose passion for Russian history began at an early age. Azar has not only made several trips to Russia to research the archives there; she has also published several books including the translations of the diaries of the Grand Duchesses and the correspondence of the Romanov family. In her Foreword, Azar describes the crush the Grand Duchess Olga had on my grandfather. It was learning about that crush which was the catalyst for me to learn more about my family history, which in turn led me to updating my grandmother’s memoir.
The 2nd edition of Upheaval will be published this October, through Downingfield Press.
