BLACK EARTH CITY: When Russia Went Wild (and So Did We)

When Hobson, a British-born descendant of White Russians, first planned the trip that forms the basis of this memoir, she thought she was traveling to the Soviet Union. But a month before her departure in 1991, a failed right-wing putsch in Moscow consigned that destination to the pages of history and ushered in the dawn of a "New Russia." Some 500 kilometers south of Moscow, in the provincial university town of Voronezh that is to be Hobson's home for the next year, a political and economic lethargy muffles the cataclysmic events of the capital. For most of the residents of Hostel No. 4, where the author takes up quarters, there is little novelty in the "new" Russia. Heavy drinking, escapist plots and extravagant romances are marks of the national psyche, as they have since well before the revolution (first and second). Yet for Hobson, even the time-honored tradition of drinking vodka on a commuter train is an adventure, and she treasures the details of an exotically mundane life. And while her title may nod to at least a modest political account, her well-groomed diary is unapologetically concerned more with Hobson and company's new independence than with Russia's. While many of the vignettes are amusing and the characters often charming, the narrative already feels dated—after all, even sleepy Voronezh has abandoned the Soviet trappings that Hobson describes, if not the wild nights she remembers so fondly. (Jan 28.)