Children of the Arbat

• Példány állapota: közepes
• Kiadás éve: 1988
• ISBN: 0091737427
• Nyelv: angol
• Oldalak száma: 685

‘History chose Anatoli Rybakov to tell a part of it that no one has ever told before: Children of the Arbat is written in the tradition of the Russian social novel of the nineteenth century. It is a geological cross section of terra incognita revealing all the layers of society of the early 1930s in Moscow. Rybakov was an eyewitness of those times and his phenomenal memory has scrupulously resurrected all the twisting alleys and dead ends of Moscow ans History. This is the first time that Stalin is portrayed without blind idealisation or blind hatred or a skillfully calculated balance of the two, but from within, from his own psychology and character. I am certain that this book will be read with the avid interest elicited by a first-rate mystery although it is higher than that genre. The publication of the novel in the USSR, where public libraries have readers’ waiting list for  it in the thousands, is one of the most daring steps of glasnost. Its publication in the West is also very important. If we are disoriented in each other’s past, we will never undestand each other in the present or in the future.’ Yevgeni Yevtuschenko