Another Winter, Another Spring: A Love Remembered

Description

This is at once an actual memoir and an intensely felt love story. Set at the turn of the twentieth century and spread across the enormous canvas of Russia itself, this is a tale of love and loyalty tested against great hardship and suffering. It is the true story of a young woman of ease and privilege, her growing up amidst the Swedish aristocracy during the 1890s, her marriage to the son of a Russian general and her long journey through the maelstrom of Russia during the Revolution, a journey through the chaos of a war-torn land that thousands were fleeing. Following her husband across the continent, she is at the Northern Front when it collapses, and is imprisoned and taken to Moscow under the most extraordinary conditions.With the skill of a natural storyteller, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence unfolds her past and the dramatic circumstances of her sweet first love. She evokes the opulent world of her early childhood culminating in her presentation to the Swedish court at the royal palace, her first days as a Red Cross nurse in a prisoner-of-war camp where she met her husband, the midnight sleigh ride that took her through the snows of a Russian winter in flight from enemy troops, her arrival in the Moscow railway station and her bewildering walk through a city gaunt and strangely silenced by war. Finally her desperate efforts to learn the fate of her imprisoned husband lead her to the cold halls of Soviet bureaucracy and the treachery of the new regime.And gradually, through the turmoil and tentative joy, she realises her growing awe and love for the great vast reaches of a land that tempers her people with the harsh cruelty of her winters and the lavish tenderness of her springs. This is more than the story of the Revolution; it is the story of a rare and determined love remembered. "Another Winter, Another Spring" is a vivid and intensely personal recollection of a woman's private confrontation with a madly public world, a journey of the heart and mind written with great sensitivity, character and insight.