The bell towers are ringing
Somewhere in the Kremlin
Somewhere in my homeland
Somewhere

-- Marina Tsvetayeva (translated by Olga Carlisle)

Olga Andreyev Carlisle has never lived in Russia, and yet throughout her life Russia has never been far.

Far from Russia captures Olga Andreyev Carlisle's young life. We see her first as an aspiring painter in post-World War II Paris. There, she savors her independent life, free from the protective reaches of her Russian émigré parents, and meets and falls passionately in love with Henry Carlisle, an American studying on the GI Bill.

With Henry she comes to the United States, to Nantucket, where she is introduced to the much more reserved ways of her husband's family. Unlike the Andreyevs, forced from their homeland by political and artistic ideals, the Carlisles have lived on Nantucket for centuries. On the shores of her husband's homeland, it becomes abundantly clear to Olga how far she is from her family's home.

The couple then moves to New York City, where Olga begins to piece together a familiar community in this strange land of artists and writers. She continues to pursue painting, studying with the great Robert Motherwell. She befriends Mark Rothko and Robert Lowell, and in each of them finds the indelible mark of Russia: the poetry of Russia.

Olga Andreyev Carlisle makes vivid the influential and heady times she describes in both postwar Paris and 1960s New York. In Far from Russia, she succeeds in articulating the enduring grip of Russia, and how that homeland -- or rather the idea of that homeland -- shaped her world.