Vanishing Futurist

As my eyelids drifted shut, I was aware of a tiny coil of excitement, tightly compressed and waiting to spring upon me. According to Baedeker, I had completed a journey of one thousand, nine hundred and thirty-seven miles from London. More than two thousand miles - the whole of Europe! - lay between me and the sawdusty, reeking butcher's shop I left behind. This is the story of Miss Gertrude Freely and of her life in Russia in the years from 1914 to 1924 - a time of revolution, civil war, famine and flight; and, for Gerty, of love, great joy, betrayal and grief. According to her, however, her life has been 'rather uneventful'. She has one aim in writing a memoir: to preserve the memory of her friend, the Soviet scientist Kiril Vinogradov. Self-deprecating, matter-of-fact and dryly humorous, she herself could not be more unlike the chaotic times she lives through - and yet, of course, she is just as much the heroine of these pages as the great Futurist thinker she befriends. Her story is not merely one of the triumph of pragmatism over the impossible ideal. It is a record of a rare, exalted state of creativity and joy, a short interval when it was not only possible to be an idealist, but right and necessary.