Famously, E. H. Carr once gave his fellow historians the jolly advice to study ¡°the historian before you begin to study the facts¡±. He went on to say: ¡°when you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing¡±. Underneath the pure strings of Clio¡¯s lyre, as a Victorian clergyman might put it, hums the industrial techno-grunge of the historian¡¯s personal concerns, political allegiances and so on: their own life, in short. In Mischka¡¯s War, like some West German experimental noisenik, Sheila Fitzpatrick, an eminent historian of Soviet Russia, has turned the buzzing right up and the strings right down: the book is about her late husband, Michael Danos.

Fitzpatrick has form for writing on the border between memoir and history (her fascinating A Spy in the Archives, for example). But this is slightly different: it¡¯s not her life, but her husband¡¯s, and throughout the book she wrestles with the rights and wrongs of this, unwilling to betray his memory, but unwilling also to betray her ¡°historian¡¯s Hippocratic oath¡­ ¡®don¡¯t leave things out because you don¡¯t like them¡¯¡±.

His story is certainly full and, as she says, singular. Born in Riga, Danos experiences first the Soviet occupation (terrible: ¡°when there was danger around, you had to go on ¡®autopilot¡¯¡­and make yourself as still and unnoticeable as possible, all the while looking for a chance to melt away from the scene of danger¡±); then the German occupation (better, if you weren¡¯t Jewish). He witnesses a mass grave and tells his mother, Olga: she knows, she¡¯d been hiding Jews and helping them to escape. In 1944, he leaves Riga heading not east but west, to Nazi Germany. The logic of going into the ¡°Lion¡¯s Den¡± was simple: if he stayed in Riga, ¡°he would be called up; if he went to Germany, he wouldn¡¯t be¡±. There, he is on a date on the outskirts of Dresden when it is firebombed: his diaries give a remarkable account of the destruction and the aftermath, and of his own responses. His time as a Displaced Person in the West conveys the confusion of the immediate post-war period and the book ends with his and his mother¡¯s emigration to New York (¡°we made it!¡±). That¡¯s the melody.

The historiographical lesson, the buzzing, is more complex: archival work, Fitzpatrick writes, favours ¡°the general and the typical¡±, but individual histories show up the ¡°anomalies, divergences¡±: one¡¯s late husband might deserve an encomium, but a historical subject needs to be seen warts and all. The book aims at ¨C and achieves ¨C the balance. Not a memoir, not a biography, not a history, but each, reflective and blended.

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Creative artists are sometimes thought to have a ¡°late style¡±, a movement beyond the work that established them to something that is simpler (The Tempest is more like a fable), somehow distils the ¡°central theme¡± of their career and yet looks forward to a future that they won¡¯t see. Perhaps historians have a ¡°late style¡± too: having mastered the tight constraints of historical writing (Clio¡¯s strings bind as well as play), they turn to a freedom that offers a profounder understanding of what history can be.

Robert Eaglestone is professor of contemporary literature and thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature and the fourth edition of Doing English were both published this year.

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Mischka¡¯s War: A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York
By Sheila Fitzpatrick
I. B. Tauris, 320pp, ?20.00
ISBN 9781788310222
Published 13 July 2017