The Soviet literary critic Sergei Dinamov once apologised to a correspondent for his delayed response to a letter by stating: sorry, I had typhus. I have not had typhus, but there has been a long delay between my last post and this one.
The main reason? Travel. Over the past month, I have researched and given talks in Boston and Washington DC. I’ve dug up a lot of material, mostly relating to my Irish queer history research (some of which I will write about in future newsletter).
But right now, I wanted to talk about some exciting news: I can now share that my first book Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of World Revolution will be published in late 2024 by Footnote Press.
For readers of this newsletter, I wanted to share some details of the story behind the book and the broader history explored within it.
It all began in the first months of my PhD when I made a remarkable discovery:
In the mid-1920s, the head of English-language translation in the Moscow headquarters of the Communist International and the Kremlin Palace was a middle-aged woman raised in a small Irish coastal village.
That Irish translator resided in Room 5 in Moscow’s famous Hotel Lux - the ‘living quarters of the world revolution’ - where her spacious room with its balcony overlooking Tverskaia Boulevard became an improvised salon for Soviet literary intellectuals and travelling western radicals.
Her name was May O’Callaghan and she died in her nineties in a North London nursing home in 1973. She had no descendants, inspired no obituaries and no history books referred to her. Her funeral was attended by only two people: Nellie Cohen, an old comrade of O’Callaghan from her days in the East London suffrage struggle and Joyce Rathbone, Nellie Cohen’s only daughter, the product of a night in a London hotel room Cohen shared with the Aran Islands novelist Liam O’Flaherty in 1928.
After tracing the broad contours of May O’Callaghan’s life, I set out on a research journey that took many years to complete.
How did a woman born in the 1880s to a middle-class Catholic family from Wexford find herself in the former palace of the Tsars in the 1920s, translating the final showdowns between Stalin and the ‘left opposition’ before Trotsky’s expulsion from the Communist Party?
That was the question that guided my research before I realised it was too narrowly conceived: O’Callaghan’s story could only really be understood in all its fascinating complexity as part of the story of her wider revolutionary generation.
All the threads I traced always led me back to one location: Moscow’s Hotel Lux, where O’Callaghan spent four transformative years in the mid-1920s.
My project became a quest to tell the story of her friendship circle of radicals who arrived to the Hotel Lux from many countries, including Britain, Ireland, the US, Germany and Ukraine. I traced what brought them to the Lux, how the experience shaped them and how they tried to survive all that followed.
To piece this together, I needed to trawl through archives across the world; from the west coast US to Moscow, tracing a story that crossed movements, continents and generations. I learned Russian, tracked down living descendants and, at one notable juncture, emailed the first woman President of Switzerland.
But what made me want to tell this story in the form of a narrative non-fiction book accessible to all was an astonishing and entirely unexpected discovery.
May O’Callaghan’s life in the Lux had a remarkable afterlife in the form of a decades-long romance between two women who owed their existence to events that took place in the Hotel Lux in the mid-1920s.
That story of the romance between these two women survives in the love letters they sent between one another, letters whose own remarkable survival in two separate family archives, one in England and the other in Spain, became one of the most moving finds of my research career.
What I initially thought was a history of world revolution was, at its core, really a love story.
And all of this began with a single moment in the first months of my research for my PhD when I read a reference to an Irish woman living in Moscow in an old communist memoir and thought: ‘huh, that’s interesting.’
What an intriguing story. Where can I read your PhD? Is there a film being done yet?:)