Rachel Potter, January 19 2002,
All About Romance http://www.likesbooks.com/paullinasimons.html


Rachel: Do you think this book would be well received in Russia? Are there plans to translate it and sell it there? It's interesting that you made the male protagonist, Alexander, American. He comes off looking so much better-stronger, smarter, wiser, more courageous-than all the Russian men in The Bronze Horseman. Did you do this deliberately? Did he have to be American? Could he have been English? Or Russian?

Paullina: I think the book will be very well received in Russia, and yes, we have sold rights to it there and it is in the process of being translated, to be published sometime in 2002. Of course I made Alexander American deliberately-without Alexander's Light, we would have had a flash of Lazarevo and then they both would have been dead-there was no hope without Alexander and his America. Books written with two Soviet protagonists, no matter how intense the love, turn out to be quite bleak. Witness Dr. Zhivago.

Rachel: There's some pretty strong sensuality between Tatiana and Alexander, yet I would hesitate to call these passages "sex scenes" (we generally prefer the term "love scene" anyway) because the emotions at that point in the story are so high. The feelings, in a way seem to overshadow the sex. Why did you feel the need to write these scenes so thoroughly and in such detail?

Paullina: As far as the sensuality between Alexander and Tania, we needed to see that as we saw everything else in the book - we saw their falling in love, we saw Tania's turmoil over her Dasha, we saw all the little intimate moments the two managed to squeeze together in Part I, and we saw all we could of death on a mass scale and on a minute scale.

How could we have seen and witnessed so much death and then suddenly skipped through joy and life and happiness? Lazarevo was the point of my whole book-how simple their love was and how universal and how passionate and how difficult to achieve in a place where Ideology is placed above Humanity. We saw it all and it made Part IV and their eventual denouement so much more rending, because we had so much invested in them. We saw them in acts of such intimacy that their heartbreak became ours.

Rachel: The Bronze Horseman seems to contain a fair amount of Biblical references and imagery. I was particularly struck by the last few paragraphs which seem to invoke the 23rd Psalm. Alexander and especially Tatiana both have a number of Christ-like characteristics. I assume this was all deliberate. Would you talk about why you did this? Was this for literary merit only, or did you mean to say something about the value of faith and religious belief?

Paullina: There are many evolutions that a book goes through before it becomes what it is when you read it, and so the religious imagery started slowly in the first drafts and grew. Certainly by the final passes, it was a major theme in the book. I did this for several reasons. Tatiana exhibited from the beginning many Christlike qualities. That was unintentional at first; to be the person she was so Alexander could love her the way he did, she had to possess traits that he had been unable to find in his Soviet life with other Soviet women, traits like lack of vanity, selflessness, honesty, great strength in the face of great suffering. The Soviet society at that time was punctuated by atheism and ostensible godlessness: one couldn't be an intellectual and believe in God, one couldn't be a communist and believe in God, so the thoughts went. So Tania had to be unlike other women in his life for him to be so drawn to her.

And while Tania may not be perfect in the eyes of some of my readers, certainly Alexander thinks she is perfect, in a godlike way, and a number of times in the book when he describes her or thinks of her, he does so in exalted terms, almost disbelieving that someone so good not only showed herself to him, but loved him so much in return. "Love is, when he is hungry, you feed him," she says to him. "I was hungry and you fed me," he says to her.

The last line is straight out of St. Mark's gospel. This is what St. Mark thinks Christ offers the world.

" You are my miracle," Alexander says to Tania. "God sent me you to give me faith." As George Bernard Shaw tells us, God performs miracles to strengthen our faith, and I for one believe him.

" Tatiana was order. She was finite matter in infinite space. Tatiana was the standard-bearer for the flag of grace and honor she carried forward with bounty and perfection in herself..." Alexander thinks of her. And in Lazarevo with the old ladies, when he defends her helping them all the time, he says, "She does enjoy it [taking care of them]. Next she will be on the floor washing your feet. But even the disciples poured wine for Christ once in a while."

That is a direct reference to the Last Supper.

" Alexander went to Lazarevo on faith." When Tania crosses herself during the blockade, she is oddly comforted by it, "as if you're not alone," she thinks, after a long rumination on God and communism. When Marina, on her deathbed, asks Tania what is like to feel so much for someone else, Tatiana replies, "It's as if you're not alone."

And there are many many other references that taken together will add up to the theme, that indeed God and faith was important in the life of people who truly loved one another. Also, that even in a godless society such as the Soviet Union, good people like Tatiana, naturally exhibited godlike features, without training or any religious instruction.

As to the penultimate passage in the book, I agree with you, it bears some of that comforting, heartbreaking Psalm 23 imagery and syntax, all subliminal. First I wrote it, and then realized it echoed something that was very familiar.

Rachel: All this was about Tania. What about Alexander's own Christlike imagery?

Paullina: First of all, to make myself happy, I thought of the Joan Osborne song, "What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us. Just a stranger on the bus..." The stranger on the bus I loved because Alexander and Tatiana's first meeting took place in and around the bus. But we can't forget, on a more serious note, that it is Alexander, not Tatiana, who lays down his life so that she could be saved. That's as Christlike as you can get.

However, in his personality, Alexander is not Christlike. He is a believing sinner. Tatiana is an ostensibly non-believing non-sinner. They both have a number of things in common, however: they both are made of steel, and they both do the right thing, even when it is very difficult. Their moral compass is not colored in gray.