1. Governess Job

Early in 1914, 22-year-old Gerty Freely travels to Russia to work as a governess, little-knowing the huge upheavals in the world and in her own life that lie ahead.

In London, 1974, Gerty begins a memoir for her daughter Sophy, looking back at that extraordinary time of war, revolution and civil war.

Most of her memories are centred on a young inventor, Nikita Slavkin, who mysteriously disappeared in 1919 and was subsequently celebrated in Soviet culture as The Vanishing Futurist.

“No word has been heard from him since […] Yet the idea persists that one day he will reappear.”

Charlotte Hobson's novel, first published in 2016.

Abridged in ten parts by Jeremy Osborne.

Read by Barbara Flynn.

Producer: Jeremy Osborne

A Sweet Talk production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in September 2020.

****** Charlotte Hobson graduated from Edinburgh University with a first in Russian. Thereafter she travelled widely in the former Soviet Union, working as an interpreter in the Caucasus, a translator, and dabbling in civil rights.

Her book, Black Earth City (2002) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2002. The Vanishing Futurist was her first novel, published in 2016.