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Winter's End
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16029 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1997 |
1,570 Words |
| Author
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
THE WINTER'S HERO
Vassily Aksyonov
New York: Random House, 1996
428 pp., $27.50
Vassily Aksyonov's wonderfully engrossing novel The Winter's Hero is a welcome change of pace from most current American fiction, seemingly lost in cris de coeur, navel gazing, and Prozac gobbling. This is a real novel in every way. Passion, family, love, ambition, war, revolt, torture, fear, and evil incarnate in the person of Joseph Stalin all vie for the reader's attention. Aksyonov, long considered one of the best novelists of his generation writing in Russian, has had a personal life and literary career reflecting much of the course of Soviet history, and he has deftly woven his knowledge into this novel.
Readers who discovered for the first time the trials and travails of the Gradov family from 1925 through World War II in the Russian author's earlier Generations of Winter should be delighted to find how he has brought the family from the end of World War II up to the death of Stalin in 1953, with a new generation. This period, as the author puts it, brought an end to a "seemingly endless winter."
While there are undeniably special pleasures for a reader already acquainted with the first volume, there is no reason for someone coming anew to Winter's Hero to feel at a disadvantage. Aksyonov in a graceful few pages of introduction brushes in the essential plot and character elements of the earlier novel. Actually, one can read Winter's Hero without a thought for what preceded it. It is hard, however, to
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