|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
A Family of Consequence
| Article
# : |
12420 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1994 |
3,232 Words |
| Author
: |
Allan Reid
Allan Reid is associate professor of Russian and chair of the
Department of Culture and Language Studies at the University
of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Canada, as well as president
of the Canadian Association of Slavists. He has written on
Bakhtin, Lotman, Babel, and Aksyonov and is currently working
on a special double issue of Canadian Slavonic Papers devoted
to contemporary east European women poets. |
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
... (1998 of 19740 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
