Rasputin was not such a bad guy - in Vanora Bennett's book

Vanora Bennett, a correspondent who has worked as an LA Times Moscow staffer, a London-based comment and feature writer and finally a historical novelist since leaving Reuters in 1996, has finally managed to combine all her loves with the publication of a historical novel set in Russia.

Midnight in St Petersburg (published by Century, an imprint of Random House, on 11 April) is her fifth novel and the first to be set entirely outside England. Dubbed “historical fiction at its best” in a review in The Times, its backdrop is the Russian Revolution of 1917. One of its main characters is Horace Wallick, an Englishman who paints for Fabergé - in real life, her great-great-uncle. Several others are musicians, like Bennett’s flute-playing father and music-teaching mother. 

The novel follows Inna Feldman, a Jewish orphan who, running away from anti-Semitism in Kiev, is helped by a charismatic peasant to find a distant cousin, Yasha. He will not let himself fall for Inna; the revolution must come first. But Inna, determined to dig in and find security in the capital, persuades the luthier family Yasha lives with to take her on as apprentice violin-maker. She then meets Horace at the house of the peasant. His name? Rasputin. No sooner has Inna established herself safely in the big city than the murder of Rasputin topples Russia into revolution, plunging both Inna and the circle of people she has come to love into new danger.

St Petersburg in 1917 would have been a dateline to fill any journalist’s heart with joy. But fiction - especially featuring a Rasputin depicted, controversially, as not such a bad guy - may seem a far cry from the objectivity of Reuters reporting. Yet Bennett says on her website that this book arose out of an interest in the way people who have lost their homeland feel and behave - which in turn stemmed from her early reporting on refugees.

“Ever since I was a reporter covering conflicts in the former Russian empire and elsewhere in the world, I’ve been fascinated by the resilience and courage with which people forced out of their homes by violence or need adapt and reshape their lives in new settings,” she writes. “I couldn’t help sympathising with people who must, with good reason, feel so alone and unprotected. Nor could I help admiring their underdog courage and determination to survive, especially once I’d seen with my own eyes some of the horrors they’d left behind.

“So, when I started thinking about this story, I knew I wanted to write a book about someone with an impossible past, someone squeezed out of one life and trying to start again in a new place - about the burst of almost insane determination that would propel them into a new orbit somewhere else, and, also, once they were safely there, about the residual fear that would then keep them quiet and panicky, for many years afterwards, fearing that one wrong word or one wrong thought might expose them, and put them back into danger. I wanted to describe the loneliness of that, and look at how difficult it is to break through that second-stage timidity and, eventually, get your courage back to live life to the full and know your own mind and heart.

“Making Inna Jewish in Russia on the eve of revolution a century ago (an oppressed minority if ever there was one) made telling her story easier. I felt that this ‘neutral’ historical context would sidestep the often toxic platitudes of the contemporary debate about refugees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants.”

Bennett has long experience of Russia. Born in 1962 in London, she started learning Russian at secondary school. In something of a departure from her arty upbringing, she joined Reuters as a graduate trainee in 1986 after reading Russian and French at Oxford. She enjoyed adventurous postings in Paris, southern Africa and the CIS. She covered conflicts from Cambodia (while a Paris trainee) and Angola and Mozambique (while in Africa) to Nagorno-Karabakh and Chechnya (while based in Moscow) and, finally, former Yugoslavia (while based in London on the World Desk). Along the way, she interviewed hundreds of displaced people across three continents - eventually, she recalls, coming to feel rather like one herself.

Her later journalistic career won her a US Overseas Press Club award for writing on Russia, and, after she returned to live in Britain in 1998, the Orwell Prize for political writing for her work at The Times and elsewhere. Now married to barrister Chris McWatters and the mother of two sons, she has freelanced for all the UK national broadsheets and written for magazines from Prospect to the Erotic Review.

After two non-fiction books about Russia - one in 1998 on Chechnya and a second in 2003 about the illegal caviar trade - she turned her hand to fiction. Portrait of an Unknown Woman, the first of four novels about English history, came out in 2006. An examination of the Reformation, it told the story of German painter Hans Holbein, a Protestant, completing two portraits of the family of Catholic Sir Thomas More: the first when More’s career at the court of Henry VIII was flourishing and the second when the politician’s star was on the wane. The novel was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel award. Three further books set in the Middle Ages followed.

Vanora Bennett ■