“Love Russia!”: Russian Kharbin in the memoirs of N. Nikolaeva

This article is a detailed review of N. Nikolaeva’s book The Japanese, published in 2016 in Ogre. The Japanese are memoirs of a Harbin Russian, the daughter of a Russian officer who found himself in China after retreat and defeat of Kolchak’s army. The article gives an overview of the images of a ‘vanishing nature’, which the memoirist managed to capture in her works, shows how deeply she understood the fate of the eastern emigrants, how precisely the topography of Harbin is reflected in the text. Special attention is paid in the article to a variety of narrative texture of N. Nikolaeva’s memoirs and thoughtful composition of her work. The plot focuses mainly on the memories of Nikolaeva’s childhood, which coincided with the years of Japanese dictatorship in North-Eastern China, the first part is devoted to her childhood memories. The second part contains biographies of parents and relatives of N. Nikolaeva, as well as a story about the return of her family from Harbin to their homeland in 1954. N. Nikolaeva’s documentary book is considered in the article in the context of artistic memories of Harbin (in particular, compared to Katya Kitayskaya by D. A. Prigov, a novel based on the memories of the writer's wife, a Harbin Russian, N. Burova), as well compared to the poetry by A. Nesmelov, whose poems are full of quotes from the book by N. Nikolaeva. The parallels between Russian and Harbin life outlined by the author of the memoirs are exceptionally interesting and represent the parallels between the old, noble (the ambient of pre-revolutionary Russia remained in Harbin until the mid-twentieth century), and the new, Soviet Russia.