Kira: BBC Radio 4

My audio drama Kira, starring Sharon Small, Sandy Grierson, Michael Bertenshaw, and Connor Curren, went out on BBC Radio 4 on 2 April 2023.  The first UK English-language dramatisation of Viktor Nekrasov's Soviet novella Kira Georgievna, it had been a long-nurtured project for me.

I first read the book as a teenager, studying it for Russian A-level, and was instantly taken with its portrayal of a sophisticated, but selfish and self-deluding woman, who lives a privileged life among the Moscow intelligentsia on the cusp of the 1960s. Published in the Soviet Union in 1961, it was written in 1959, during the brief period of political 'Thaw' after the death of dictator Stalin in 1953, and was a sensation, becoming a best-seller at home and across numerous territories in translation.

 

Sharon Small: Kira

On the surface, it tells an apparently simple story: celebrated Ukrainian sculptor, Kira (41), is married to respected Russian artist and professor, Nikolai (63), with whom she enjoys a companionable, but passionless relationship.  When she receives a sought-after commission from the state to sculpt an archetype of 'Youth' for a high-profile exhibition, she embarks on an affair with her young model, electrician Yurochka (22), justifying it to herself as artistic rejuvenation.  

Then out of the blue, her first husband, Vadim (a fellow Ukrainian), returns from twenty-two years of imprisonment in the gulag labour camps of Kolyma, throwing her comfortable life into turmoil. Kira assumes they will pick up where they left off - the romantic idyll of 1937 Kyiv where they were both carefree students, before Vadim's arrest by the NKVD (Soviet secret police) - and for a time they play this out, revisiting the Kyiv of their youth.

 

But the city has been redeveloped since World War Two - and so has Vadim.  His outlook has changed with experience, but self-absorbed Kira's has not, and on a trip to rural Ukraine to visit Vadim's mother and sister, they find common ground slipping away.  Vadim has a new wife back in Magadan and a young child, the apple of his eye, who cannot be forgotten. 

 

Sandy Grierson: Vadim

When an emergency calls Kira back to Moscow, she is forced to confront uncomfortable truths and unspoken traumas of the past - and ultimately to own her choices...

Back in my schooldays, what struck me about the book was the surprisingly modern central character, who unashamedly pursues self-gratification unusual for female literary heroines of the time; the portrait of a Bohemian elite in Soviet Russia, which the Cold War had led us to assume was all austerity and restriction; and the perceptive psychology of Kira and the three contrasting men in her life.  

 

Returning to it now, in the wake of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, I became more attuned to the political themes, and the skilful way Nekrasov uses the web of romantic relationships as an allegory to explore responses to the trauma of Stalinism - is it better to confront a brutal past, or to bury it?  To stand firm against oppression and suffer for it, or pragmatically to collude, to survive and prosper?

 

Kira Georgievna pre-dates publication of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's more famous and explicit work exposing the gulag system, by twelve years. Between the fall of the Iron Curtain and the rise of Putin, it was easy to forget how dangerous it had been in the 1950s to reference such things within the Soviet Union at all, let alone to create a sympathetic portrait of a man who had survived the camps, and to explore the random injustice of what had been done to him and so many thousands of others - Vadim had committed no crime, other than to be an "intellectual", a poet, yet he had lost twenty-two years of freedom.  We can see chilling parallels in Russia today.

 

Michael Bertenshaw: Nikolai

I realised that what's not said in the book is as important as what is.  Vadim's arrest, for instance, isn't dramatised at all by Nekrasov; I wrote that scene in, because I felt it's needed for the play, but it's interesting that he chose to exclude it, to reference it only obliquely, left to the imagination and filtered through Kira's reluctance to dwell on negative incidents.  As Vadim becomes more accustomed to life in the outside world, we see that he does want to talk about his experiences in the gulag, but those from his past to whom he has returned - Kira and his invalid mother - don't want to hear it; they are not ready to accept it (much as some Russians today don't want to confront the truth of what's happening in Ukraine). Consequently, his engagement with them cannot develop.

The novel is deftly structured, moving back and forth in time to peel back layers of nuance as the story progresses. I have tried to preserve some of this in the dramatisation, which was a challenge with just fifty-seven minutes to convey the whole book!  Early in the work, there's a whole chapter that focuses on Kira's backstory as a young girl in Kyiv - very specifically referencing her father's profession as an otolaryngologist.  There wasn't room to cover all of this in the play (although I've included elements of it in later scenes), but I pondered its significance, and found revelation in a book by Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station (handily summarised here).  

 

Vadim was arrested and sent into Siberian exile in Stalin's Great Purge of 1937, which targeted Trotskyists and other political opponents of Stalin, along with artists, intellectuals, and anyone perceived to have subversive leanings, however unfounded.  Kira was expelled from art college, due to her association with him, and only the intervention of her father, who travelled with her to Moscow to plead for clemency, enabled her reinstatement a year later.  When the Germans advanced on Kyiv in 1941, she and her family were evacuated to Alma-Ata (now Almaty), where she later met her second husband, Nikolai, who was already an established artist and professor.  

 

Connor Curren: Yurochka

Manley's book, subtitled, 'Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War' examines the mass evacuation of key Soviet cities at that time (those cities prioritised for military strategy rather than greatest humanitarian need) and explains the hierarchy of desirable destinations - well-resourced Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, and Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan, being the most sought-after by artists, intellectuals, and the political elite.  

You could only attain such top locations if you were well-connected, for instance by profession or family influence.  Nekrasov then is telling his Soviet reader that Kira was already born into privilege - her father had a respected status that saved her from Vadim's fate. Of course, wartime evacuation was not easy for anyone (many died en route or in the ensuing years away, or lost their homes forever); Kira did suffer during the war and when her father died, but she found a way to replicate that privilege in marrying Nikolai.  Survival.  We see the straitened life she might otherwise have lived, when she visits an old friend, Lida, in Kyiv.  

 

Manley also describes the cultural significance of railway stations in wartime, as portals of life or death.  The Soviet Union was a vast territory, with evacuation journeys, often on inadequately-equipped local trains, sometimes taking weeks. Getting a place on a train depended on connections, with carriages designated to specific professions (provision by the Soviet Writers' Union was notably generous!).  Some evacuees, however, didn't even survive to embark on those journeys, being crushed to death at the station; and no-one knew what might await them at the other end.  I think there's perhaps an echo of this leap into the unknown in Kira's railway station departure to Kyiv, to make a rendezvous with Vadim, waved off by both Yurochka and the unsuspecting Nikolai.

 

When Kira and Vadim meet up in Kyiv, they seek out their old haunts, but find that the main street, Khreshchatyk, so fondly remembered, has been completely rebuilt. In September 1941, in an event that became known as the Kyiv Inferno, all its major buildings and those in adjacent streets were blown up - not, it is alleged, by the invading Germans, but by agents of the Soviet government, enacting a scorched earth policy.  The resonance today is all too apparent...

 

For the radio production, we were keen to use authentic music of the period, but clearing the rights for all the tracks on our wish list proved tricky, due to the vagaries of transliterated spelling, and the limitations of copyright registration in the Soviet Union.  We did, however, manage to secure the key 1930s refrain, 'Serdtse' ('Heart'), sung by Ukrainian Pyotr Leshchenko, and, for the end titles, 'Moscow Nights', hugely popular in the late 1950s, sung by Vladimir Troshin.  The soulful instrumental refrain used throughout the piece is a Finnish recording by Estonian Georg Ots, who was very familiar to Soviet audiences.  (A bonus track for you: Shto Takoye Lyubov - 'What is this thing, love?' - sung by Klavdiye Shulzhenko; we couldn't clear this, but you can enjoy it on YouTube and think of Kira!). Huge thanks to my wonderful producer, Abigail Le Fleming, for persevering with this, for her sensitive direction and editing, and for getting the whole thing commissioned.

 

It's a great shame that this fascinating book is currently out of print in English (translated by Walter N Vickery), as discussed in the BBC's introductory programme, Opening Lines, to which I contributed.  Publishers, please take note!

And if you'd like to join me in a toast, maybe order a bottle of Ukrainian vodka and pickles to support Kira's countrymen today?