A Very Private Affair: A Soviet Dissident's English Wife

This is a memoir of the author's aunt, Speranza Howard (1903 -1995), who was born and brought up in pre–revolutionary Russia and escaped with her family, in 1920, to London.

But it is also a story about the Russian symbolist writer Boris Pilniak, who visited Britain just once, but who claimed to have lost his heart forever to a half-English girl he met in 1923.

'Boris Pilniak' was the pen name of Boris Andreevich Vogau, born in Mozhaisk on 11th October 1894. His writing career began seriously in 1915. By the time of the October Revolution he had written at least 17 short stories, ten of which had been published. His novel 'The Naked Year' published in 1921, was well received by his fellow writers in the All-Russian Union of Writers, which elected him to their governing board in 1922.

The identity of his 'English Wife' was unknown until two bundles of love-letters were discovered in the loft of the deceased Speranza; letters written by Boris to her, from 1923 and 1929.

Said the author; "Thus began my researches into their long affair, which had remained a secret for the whole of my aunt’s life. When I learned of the defamation of Boris Pilniak in 1929, accused by his writer colleagues of communicating with White Russian emigres, I was determined to uncover the true nature of my aunt’s involvement in Boris Pilniak’s life and his untimely death, ordered by Stalin, in 1938."

"With the expert assistance of a translator and a graphic-designer my book is now complete, with the love-letters forming the spine of the narrative, with the many photographs and memorabilia from the Howard’s family life in St Petersburg, and with my own imaginative reconstructions of what life must have been like for my aunt before and after the Russian Revolution. For anyone interested in Russia now I think it makes a fascinating account of the impact of 20th century politics, on ordinary human lives."