So I was very interested to discover this autobiography, written piecemeal and late in life, though it only takes Ransome's story up to 1931 (the remaining thirty-odd years of his life are summarised in a postscript by his younger friend and colleague Rupert Hart-Davies).
Perhaps Ransome's most intriguing years were those spent as a journalist and researcher of folklore in Russia, before and after the 1918 revolution. He was on intimate terms with many of the major players, including Lenin and Trotsky, and indeed, Trotsky's personal secretary became his second wife. Ransome claims that he was able to become so close to the Bolsheviks because he himself was completely 'unpolitical.' This contention has led to speculation that he was in fact acting as a spy during this period, though naturally there is no discussion of espionage in the autobiography. He and Evgenia made a hair-raising escape to safety into Estonia in the chaos of fighting between White and Red, with Ransome bluffing his way through the front lines and Evgenia riding on the back of a cart (according to other sources, with millions of roubles worth of diamonds smuggled in her petticoats). To be honest, the ins and outs of the revolutionary period, with its shifts in power and double-crosses, were quite hard for me to follow, but it was a good reminder that the narrative of history is difficult to discern at the time of the events -- everything is in chaos, and it's only after the dust has settled that the story becomes clear (and sometimes not even then). Who knows what the established story of our own times will be in a generation or two? The moments that seem crucial to us might end up being insignificant in the broad sweep of history, and perhaps the most important developments are the ones we are not even aware of.
I'll have to seek this out. I read a biography many years ago, but wasn't aware that there was an autobiography too. One of the things I remember reading was that Ransome was trusted by the likes of Trotsky because out of the foreign journalists describing events in Russia, he was the one who wrote accounts that were as truthful, accurate and non-sensational as possible. I also remember a sad detail from later in his life, when he fell out with the family that had partly inspired S and A, and changed the inscription at the front of future editions of the book.
ReplyDeleteOh, no! That's so sad. It must have happened after 1931, when the autobiography stops. The mother in the family was a daughter of the Collingwood family who befriended AR as a young man and who he always felt very close to. I forgot to mention that he had a family connection to Australia, too, which I guess explains the (often inaccurate) references to Australia in S&A -- I don't think he bothered to fact check!
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