In his great novel Austerlitz, WG Sebald told the story of European Holocaust in the 20th century through the medium of its refugee architecture, in train stations, hotels and state archives, the novel’s central character rebuilding his past from fragments, each of which had the sharp edge of atrocity. Maurice Casey’s Hotel Lux inhabits similar space, telling the story of three generations intertwined by radical politics and queer love in the dark shadow of Stalinism, its cast of characters as unruly as the appearance of the drunken Liam O’Flaherty, a man who never drank tea as if he feared water might kill him.
Hotel Lux was the 1920s Moscow home of those who fled the capitalist west for the dream of communist revolution. These were often refugees from earlier phases of rebellion elsewhere. Among them was May O’Callaghan, the Vienna educated daughter of a head constable of the Royal Irish Constabulary and a lead agitator for women’s suffrage in the circle of Sylvia Pankhurst. O’Callaghan learned Russian in London’s East End and graduated by the early 1920s to become the Comintern’s head of English translation. With this came digs in the Hotel Lux and entry to the dizzy circuits of world revolution. Casey plots this journey with great and sometimes giddy detail, the comings and goings of the revolutionary diaspora an education in sex and visas alike.
Casey’s narrative hinges on a series of unexpected moments, some of them personal and some archival. O’Callaghan appears Zelig-like at key moments of world turmoil, in turn affecting the lives of generations to follow. Casey is terrific on these intimate twists of circumstance, frequently with fatal consequence. The horror of Stalin’s purges and paranoia, the delusions and the dreams are all here, as is the fragile survival of love. If affection is the first ground of memory, the archive is its late flowering and Hotel Lux its conservatory, Casey’s history a tender nurture of pasts we overlook, but which whisper to us all the same. The book is not perfect, is over-long and has a few flat jokes. But it lights its subjects with such sensitivity that it makes much of contemporary history look ghostly by comparison, so substantial is Casey’s illumination of this lost world.
Prof Nicholas Allen teaches at the University of Georgia
