The Russländer
A novel
Emblem Editions, McClelland & Stewart, 2002
McClelland & Stewart, 2001
Jury Citation for Giller Prize: “Sandra Birdsell’s The Russländer evokes with artistic nobility the daily life among a Mennonite community in Russia at the beginning of the first world war, a war that tragically consumes their ordinary expectations and their lives in the cheap excesses and banality of murder. With her formidable gifts for psychological observation and her uncanny details of daily life a century ago, Birdsell weaves a place as important as any in our literature. By showing how power is often foisted upon us from an outside world, The Russländer illuminates, with an artistic glow of the first rank, the intimate certainty that evil will not dominate kindness, truth, or love.”
Katherine (Katya) Vogt is now an old woman living in Winnipeg, but the story of how she and her family came to Canada begins in Russia in 1910, on a wealthy Mennonite estate. Here they lived in a world bounded by the prosperity of their landlords and by the poverty and disgruntlement of the Russian workers who toil on the estate. But in the wake of the First World War, the tensions engulfing the country begin to intrude on the community, leading to an unspeakable act of violence. In the aftermath of that violence, and in the difficult years that follow, Katya tries to come to terms with the terrible events that befell her and her family. In lucid, spellbinding prose, Birdsell vividly evokes time and place, and the unease that existed in a country on the brink of revolutionary change. The Russländer is a powerful and moving story of ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times.
Medal & Ribbons
- Finalist for The Giller Prize
- Book of the Year, Saskatchewan Book Awards
- City of Regina Book of the Year
- Fiction Award of the year, Saskatchewan Book Awards
Praise for The Russländer
- “Birdsell has outdone herself. There is temptation to quote The Russländer in full. It’s that good a novel.” — National Post
- “She (Birdsell) has reached deep for her story, and that of countless immigrants to a new land, and come up with treasure as precious as that silver, two-handled cup that serves as a totem throughout this novel …” — Hamilton Spectator
- “… a painstaking labour of love and devotion …” — The Globe and Mail
- “The Russländer is profound. Birdsell’s book bears careful witness to not only the settling of many Canadian prairie farms, but to cultural and personal endurance within a diverse nation.” — Quill and Quire (star review)
- “The Russländer … is exquisitely written. It never labours a point, it carries us like the wind in and about the world she chooses to describe. There isn’t a clumsy word in it.” — Hamilton Examiner
- “… Sandra Birdsell probably couldn’t have foreseen she was writing a book that can be described as timely…. Birdsell’s story of two Mennonite families victimized by conflict speaks as eloquently of today’s strife as it does of past struggles.” — Ottawa Citizen
- “The Russländer … is a novel full of inventive richness, which resists all efforts to be put aside. Birdsell has transformed scattered fragments of family history into the burnished gold of fiction.”
– The London Free Press
