The Beginning of Spring

Background

Fitzgerald had a strong interest in Russian literature, and starting in the 1960s took courses in Russian language. She toured Moscow and environs in 1975, which included a visit to Tolstoy's house and a dacha in a birch forest.

In the early 1970s, as part of her research on Edward Burne-Jones, Fitzgerald became friends with a Swiss art curator, Mary Chamot, who had been brought up in pre-Revolution Russia. Chamot's family had had a greenhouse business in Moscow since the mid-1800s, and they had stayed on for a few years after the Revolution. The original title of the novel was The Greenhouse.

Character summary

Frank Albertovich Reid

Russian-born of English parents, educated in England, runs a Moscow printing shop he inherited from his father. He is conflicted about returning to England.

Elena Karlovna "Nellie" Reid

Frank's English-born wife, she has abandoned Frank and their three children without leaving a forwarding address, but presumably back in England.

Dolly, Ben, Annushka

Their three children.

Charlie Cooper

Nellie's brother, a widower.

Selwyn Osipych Crane

English-born assistant to Frank. Acolyte of Tolstoy and his ascetic philosophy. Poet, author of Birch Tree Thoughts.

Toma

Servant at the Reid house.

Vladimir "Volodya Vasilych" Semyonovich Gregoriev

A student who breaks into Reid's print shop. State security uses him as a pawn to put pressure on Reid.

Lisa Ivanovna

Peasant girl hired to watch over the children in Nellie's absence.

Egor, Matryona

Couple who were negligent caretakers of the dacha in the forest.

Arkady Kuriatin

Muscovite businessman, filled with wild peasant gusto.

Matryona Osipovna Kuriatin

Arkady's wife.

Muriel Kinsman

An English governess in Russia.

Cecil/Edwin Graham

Chaplain of Moscow's English Church.

Mrs. Graham

The chaplain's wife, she knows all that goes on in the British expatriate community.

Reception

"Its greatest virtue is perhaps the most old-fashioned of all. It is a lovely novel."

BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast a radio adaptation in 2015.

Critical review

The novel has a chapter of its own in Peter Wolfe Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald and Hermione Lee Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life.