Book Review: Summer of the Barshinskeys

Title: The Summer of the Barshinskeys

Author: Diane Pearson

Date: 1984

Publisher: Crown

ISBN: none

Length: 431 pages

Quote: “[T]he story of the Barshinskeys, which became our story, too, stretched over many summers and winters.”

The “Summer of the Barshinskeys” is 1902, when Mr. Barshinskey, a Russian emigrant fiddler, is hired to tend Mr. Hayward’s cattle in a rural English village, and arrives with his wife, an English Quaker, pushing all of their furniture in a hand cart. Behind the come three children, “two girls and a boy, the same as us,” notes young Sophie Willoughby eagerly.

The Willoughbys are “peasant gentry”—a family who have to work for their livings, but have been working in the same place long enough to be established and prosperous. The children are Sophie, age eleven, destined to be a domestic servant, and Edwin, a bit older, planning a career of railroad work, and Lillian, the pretty teenager studying to become a dressmaker.

\The Barshinskey children (Pearson artlessly notes that they spell their name “with c’s and h’s and s’s and z’s,”as if at least the U.S. half of her audience weren’t familiar with the name Brzezinski in 1984) are Daisy Mae, Ivan, and Galina, approximately the same ages as the Willoughbys. Naturally each boy has a crush on the other boy’s older sister. Naturally each girl has a crush on the other girl’s older brother.

Older sisters don’t come off too well in this book, probably because who ever heard of a fifteen-year-old girl having a crush on the thirteen-year-old boy next door? Lillian is pretty and too obsessed with her own prettiness to love anyone back. Galina is pretty and, in Sophie’s narrative, “sensual.” In the third-person parts of the book, people who aren’t Nice English Girls use the W-word.

Neither Sophie nor Daisy Mae is considered pretty, even by the men they eventually marry, but both of them have the fortitude of character their showier older siblings lack. Edwin is at least a good hard worker. About all that makes Ivan attractive, even to Sophie, is that he’s more than eleven years old and is not Sophie’s brother or cousin; he achieves a sort of hero status later on, in the war.

During the “Summer of the Barshinskeys” the younger children become friends (Galina and Lillian are already too old to be interested in school friends). In the autumn life events separate the two families again. Nevertheless,fifteen years later, when even Sophie and Daisy Mae are adults, they reconnect—in war-torn Russia, yet, where Edwin is wasting his money on Galina and getting beaten up for her sake, and tough little Daisy Mae is working on a Quaker humanitarian mission. Daisy Mae has always dreamed of being rescued by Edwin, from something, and eventually she is, even if she and her friends do more of the rescuing. Willoughbys and Barshinskeys remain friends as adults, they share adventures, and at least some of them marry each other.

Of this story Pearson says that “most of it” is fiction, but “it could well and truly have happened. Indeed, some of the personal experiences that were related to me were far stranger than my tale.” Her motive seems to be not so much to give the two younger sisters happy-ever-after endings, although she does, nor even to write a novel about “Russians As People,” although that’s the title of a nonfiction book she cites in the endnotes to this novel, as to write an adventure story about the Quaker mission in Russia.

Needling U.S. audiences might have been a secondary motive. The Cold War was still on—although everyone was thoroughly tired of it—and some American readers might have needed the reminder that at first the U.S. was officially sympathetic to the brand-new U.S.S.R.

I personally think most novels written for adults are, at best, froth on the stream of life, and this is one of the frothier kind, but I’ll forgive its frivolous plot since it does highlight an interesting bit of history that U.S. writers often forgot during the Cold War years. It’s harder to forgive Pearson for switching without warning from first to third person, and back, than it is to forgive all this novel’s other defects together. While keeping the Quakers in the background, focussing mainly on people they’ve helped in some way, it makes a statement of support for the Quakers.

Who should read it? Adults only. There’s a good deal of extramarital sex in the book, not all of it even involving Galina; children won’t learn any details here but they will see adults acting irrational under its influence. This is one of those novels where most of the characters are Christians but they don’t spell out a Christian message for the reader. Violence, like sex, is more implicit than explicit. Pearson does spell out one scene of mild torture and a few gruesome deaths, including one character readers might have been hoping to see reform. 

In the end it’s a life-affirming story that weaves Pearson’s elders’ memories of real adventures into its sweet-romance fantasy. If you like a romance with international glamour and intrigue and battles and so on in the background, you’ll enjoy this one.