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Adapted from an entry in Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,“ in GoLocal24.com
A Stolen Past, by John Knowles, is a 1983 novel as told by a former Yale undergraduate, about his friendship with and mentorship in college by a famous writer (based on Thornton Wilder, who died in 1975) and a family of Russian nobility/aristocracy living in a somewhat decayed but grand house on the Hudson north of New York City years after fleeing their motherland after the Bolshevik Revolution. The mysterious theft of a huge diamond plays a major role in this very atmospheric (including the weather itself) narrative. Like much of Knowles’s best work, it focuses on how unexpected and complicated experiences, inspiring and disillusioning, form maladjusted young characters’ sense of themselves and their relationship with others.
Knowles’s first book, A Separate Peace, published in 1960, has stayed his most famous and is considered a classic and an example of his skill in crafting coming-of-age stories. I didn’t read it until the’ 70s, although I was quite familiar with its setting, an elite New England (then) all-boys boarding school based on Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, N.H. It has always surprised me that a book with such characters and, in a way, exotic setting, and what seems to be a gay subtext, has been so enduringly popular.
The Russians in the book reminded me a little of Vanya Vosoff, a Russian émigré or exile (he had been an officer in Czar Nicholas II’s army) who married a previously married WASP lady whose family owned a company in the shoe industry. The Vosoffs, with her grandson, lived next door to us in a Massachusetts town in the ‘50s and into the ‘60s.
Mr. Vosoff’s English was somewhat eccentric and incomplete but I remember him telling me about some of the plants and animals of the countryside of his motherland. He always seemed to be doing projects in the yard but otherwise didn’t seem to have a job. I wish I had been old enough to ask him about Russia under the old regime, the revolution and the horrifying civil war that followed it. It wasn’t all that many decades before then that those cataclysmic events took place.
There’s sometimes a lot of history next door.
