How a novelist found the lost city of Shanghai

Elvira Baryakina talks about her novel ‘White Shanghai,’ a work that connects wildly different tales of struggle and survival in the best traditions of epic Russian storytelling (Russia Beyond Headlines)

After the Bolshevik Revolution, tens of thousands of Russians fled to Shanghai, which became Asia’s most cosmopolitan city.

Historical novelist Elvira Baryakina’s portrait of the roaring twenties in “White Shanghai” is a suitably bewildering kaleidoscope: prostitutes, bandits and fortune-telling Buddhist monks, warrior Cossacks and singing Mexicans. “Almost like Paris, New York, and Babylon combined,” is how Baryakina described 1920s Shanghai in an interview with RBTH.