Autorentext

Alexander Voloshin (1884-1960) was born in Ananiv, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His father was a prominent figure in the Ukrainian national movement, and he was equally comfortable in Ukrainian and Russian, adopting the latter language in order to advance his career as a theatrical performer. This career was disrupted by his service in the Russian Imperial Army during WWI and the Civil War. His flight from Crimea--first to Turkey, then, via Berlin and Latin America, to New York, and finally to Los Angeles--is chronicled in his mock epic poem Sidetracked, which he composed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, while working as an extra in Hollywood. Under the name "Alex Voloshin," he appeared in dozens of films between 1927 and 1939, but he ended his days as a taxi driver.

Klappentext

The first English translation of Alexander Voloshin's mock epic of Russian Émigré life

With great wit and warmth, Alexander Voloshin's Sidetracked provides unique insight into one of the major human dramas of the twentieth century: the escape of some two million refugees from the collapsing Russian Empire in the wake of the revolutions of 1917. A former officer in the White Army, Voloshin spent the late 1920s and 1930s struggling to make a living in Hollywood as an extra. His lively yet poignant poem follows his countrymen as they resist the Bolsheviks in what is now Ukraine, suffer crushing defeat, and take flight--first to Europe, then to New York, and, eventually, to Los Angeles. The chapters devoted to the lives of émigrés in Hollywood, which Voloshin knew so well, are a priceless document of the town's Golden Age, as viewed from the bottom up.