The Fateful Cause Book

Capuchin Classics publ.2012 foreword by Bridget Kendall
Written by an English writer living in Russia in at the time of the Russian Revolution, the novel wonderfully depicts gentry life in St.Petersburg (Petrograd) as the Revolution approaches and then unfolds in its earliest days. His familiarity with the ethos of the city, its topography, its mythic qualities are impressive, as is his knowledge of Russian expressions. The style and content could place the novel in the tradition of Tostoy and Turgenev. In this sense it is an intimate portrait of a family with all its drama, but it is also a fascinating portrayal of the earliest hints and realities of Revolution in its earliest days through the eyes of the Russian characters and their English friends. The narrative device is of a story told by a sympathetic outsider, showing what he himself has observed and what he claims to have learned from reports of the other characters. He professes to be outside the story, but he is a character in his own right, and interacts with the characters and the plot development.
Bridget Kendall's Preface asks, "How do you make sense of revolution when you are in the midst of it? Hugh Walpole's answer was to allow us to see it the way he and his friends did, as a surreal backdrop to ordinary life until the simmering unrest turned to violence and it could be ignored no longer." She concludes, "In some ways his novel is also a lament: the cozy, lamplit, bourgeois world of pre-Revolutionary Russia which Walpole describes so affectionately was about to vanish forever." p.13