The discovery of oil in Baku brought Ummulbanu Asadullayeva’s family respect if not respectability. Peasant-born, her grandparents ranked by the time of her birth among the richest in the Russian empire, thanks to the abundance of black gold unearthed on their doorstep. Yet while oil barony went hand in hand with fantastic wealth and political prestige, the changes it wrought privately, such as they were, did little to convert her family into paragons of refinement and cultivation. Luckily for us, the result makes for some very fine reading.
Published in Paris in 1945, after Asadullayeva had fled Azerbaijan and completed her émigrée transfiguration into the successful French writer ‘Banine’, Days in the Caucasus is a romantic and gloriously comic account of a heady and turbulent youth spent on the shores of the Caspian. Spanning the last days of the Russian empire and the establishment of Soviet power in the Caucasus, Banine’s autobiography captures a rarefied world on the brink of extinction.
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