Peasants who became millionaires overnight as oil gushed from their lands
Banine describes Caucasus as a region caught between empires and epochs between Christian West and the Muslim East, between Tsarist autocracy, Bolshevik revolution, between tradition, superstition and clan. Banine writes about her childhood, her grandfather was one of Baku’s overnight millionaires, a farmer who had the fortune to find oil in his land, and her family filled with quarrelling uncles, quarrelsome aunts and promiscuous cousins.
Banine youngest of the four daughters, describes the wealth and limitless as the oil deposits under the Caspian’s shores and rich life decorated with orientalist details hammams and desert gardens, childish crushes, second wives and stolen kisses.
“The champagne flowed freely , to use the classical phrase, thus our world marched towards disaster” Banine writes.
Before she leaves for an uncertain exile with her new husband, she visits her family’ summer mansion, now requisitioned by the Commission for the Creation of Holiday Camps, among the vines and poplars that she had imbued with personalities as a child, she allows herself a introspective account of loss. ” now I understand that things, people, feelings were destined to disappear one after the other, that instead of happiness life was separation and regret”. Banine ditched her boring husband in Istanbul and made herself a new life and a new persona as did Kurban Said as a writer in Paris
In Caucasus, a little known novel called Ali and Nino, written in 1930s by a mysterious multi-pseudonymous author Kurban Said. Ali and Nino is a love story between a Georgian princes and a noble Azeri boy set in Baku during the Russian Revolution, the author became the subject of a romantic biography, The Orientalist, by Tom Reiss, which followed Kurban Said through several identities and adventures from Baku to Istanbul, Germany and Italy through fame and exile.
Days in the Caucasus by Banine Translated by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova, Pushkin Press £16.99, 288 pages.