The Black Russian, by Vladimir Alexandrov – review
From our UK edition
‘Unabashed luxury, elaborate displays of rich fabrics, gilt, soaring ceilings, glittering chandeliers...’ Thus does Vladimir Alexandrov describe what Moscow’s elite demanded of Maxim, the 1912 nightclub helmed by The Black Russian’s unlikely subject, the American Frederick Bruce Thomas. He was ‘the black man with a broad Russian nature’ who reinvented himself as celebrity nightclub impresario Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas. Alexandrov’s sense of spectacle is no less keen. The Black Russian vaults breathlessly from set-piece to set-piece as it traces the journey of its hero from rural Mississippi to the opulent cabarets of Moscow, to Bolshevik-occupied Odessa and, finally, to a debtors’ prison in postwar Constantinople.
