A Russian American writer catapults herself into the maelstrom of Russian life at a time of seismic change for both.
The daughter of Russian émigrés, Ingrid Bengis grew up wondering whether she was American or, deep down, "really Russian." In 1991, naïvely in love with Russia and Russian literature, she settled in St. Petersburg, where she was quickly immersed in "catastroika," a period of immense turmoil that mirrored her own increasingly complex and contradictory experience.
Bengis's account of her involvement with Russia is heightened by her involvement with B, a Russian whose collapsing marriage, paralleling the collapse of the Soviet Union, produces a situation in which "anything could happen." Their relationship reflects the social tumult, as well as the sometimes dangerous consequences of American "good intentions." As Bengis takes part in Russian life-becoming a reluctant entrepreneur, undergoing surgery in a St. Petersburg hospital, descending into a coal mine-she becomes increasingly aware of its Dostoevskian duality, never more so than when she meets the impoverished, importuning great-great-granddaughter of the writer himself. Beneath the seismic shifting, remains a centuries-old pre-occuption with "the big questions": tradition and progress, destiny and activism, skepticism and faith. With its elaborate pattern of digression and its eye for the revealing detail, Bengis's account has the hypnotic intimacy of a late-night conversation in a Russian kitchen, where such questions are perpetually being asked.
"Metro Stop Dostoevsky is to this old man the most sane and intelligent book anyone could possibly write about what it is like to be a human being at the start of this new millennium."
Kurt Vonnegut
"There is so much to say in praise of Metro Stop Dostoevsky that I will content myself with but one remark. I read it all in something approaching whole pleasure, and how often can we make such a claim?"
Norman Mailer
"We're in the company of a cockeyed optimist. And as with all optimists, there's a price to pay. Go with Ingrid Bengis as she pays it in Russia. This book is the story of her glorious redemption."
