New Books In Historical Fiction

Illegitimacy doesn’t mean much in today’s Europe and North America. In an age when we celebrate many different kinds of families, “bastard” has become an epithet thrown, most often inaccurately, at someone who upsets you. But that was not always true. In early 19th-century Russia, for example, you could marry in one church only to have the marriage denied in another, leaving your children unable to inherit, stripped even of your name. This reality defined the lives of fictional people, such as Pierre Bezukhov in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and real ones–for example, Alexander Herzen, the Russian socialist writer who took refuge in London after falling foul of Tsar Nicholas I. It defines the life of Nicolas Nijinsky, hero of The Estate of Wormwood and Honey (Russian Estate Books, 2012). Nicolas’s early life as the cherished only son of a rural nobleman vanishes in an instant when his mother dies and his father remarries. As a child, he cannot understand why abuse and mist

Historians are not supposed to make stuff up. If it happened, and can be proved to have happened, then it’s in; if it didn’t, or can’t be documented, then it’s out. This way of going about writing history is fine as far as it goes. It does, however, have a significant drawback: it limits the historian’s ability to tell the truth–not the truth of “facts,” but the truth of stories. Facts are facts; stories have meaning. Most history books are full of facts; yet many lack stories, and necessarily so. As a practicing historian, I can tell you this situation is very frustrating. We know that sometimes the facts are just not enough, but there is nothing we can do about it within the confines of our discipline. There are historians–if that’s what they are–who just can’t stand these restrictions. They want to tell historical stories, and they do. They write “historical fiction” and, as a rule, they get very little respect in the liter