|
|
|
|
A Family of Consequence |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Allan Reid |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 10/1/1994 |
| Size: 3,232 Words, 19,740 Characters |
|
GENERATIONS OF WINTER
Vassily Aksyonov
New York: Random House, 1994
592 pp., $25.00
The final body count is still being debated, but it is known for certain that many millions of innocent victims died as a direct or indirect result of Soviet tyranny. All of this has been chronicled, analyzed, studied, portrayed in literature and other arts, debated, denied, and confirmed at great length. A seemingly endless number of camp survivors, observers, and others affected in different ways by the terror have written an enormous amount of prose, poetry, and memoirs about it--of greatly varying literary quality. Among the better products more or less familiar to Western readers, Rybakov's Children of the Arbat, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or his Gulag Archipelago, and perhaps Shalamov's Kolyma Tales spring quickly to mind along with such historical works as the dissident historian Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge. Moreover, a plethora of works has come out in the last five years or so, and there is no sign of abatement. It would seem, then, that any further additions to this body of work would be either redundant or of interest to specialists only. In principle, that may be true, especially since recent and current events in the former Soviet Union are now generating a totally different focus of attention. Nevertheless, Generations of Winter is a fresh and exciting contribution to the literature devoted to this period.
Indeed, among the great host of works chronicling the period of Stalin's terror, Generations of Winter will occupy a special place for a long time to come. Ever the stylistic innovator, Aksyonov has combined the historical novel, the roman-fleuve, elements of modernist construction and experimentation, autobiographical reflection, and Russian literature's traditional concern with those accursed eternal questions in a bold and provocative anti-Soviet epic overflowing with literary, cultural, and ph...
Read Full Article
..., the reader is left with the sense that the family has not been destroyed. There remain a few Gradovs from each generation still alive who are not spiritually destroyed and are capable of regeneration. At least one is yet to be born. There is good reason to suspect that, in the tradition of the great Russian novelists, Aksyonov will tell us more about the Gradovs and Russia's generations. vbcrlf
(1,995 of 19,740 characters)
|
|
|
Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
|
The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
