Word: arbat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Many intellectuals consider Children of the Arbat to be the most important work of fiction by a Soviet author since Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, not least because it treats subjects that Soviet literature has never dealt with before. Rybakov's book is an attempt to come to literary terms with the Stalin era, just as Pasternak tried to give literary meaning to the Russian revolution and civil war of his own generation. But unlike Doctor Zhivago, which first appeared in Italian, Children of the Arbat is coming out in its author's native land and language...
Like Solzhenitsyn's work, Children of the Arbat is highly autobiographical and is as much nonfiction as fiction. Rybakov spent his childhood at 51 Arbat Street, where much of the action takes place. Many of the book's characters, including Stalin, his private secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev and Sergei Kirov, are real people. Most of the fictional characters are also patterned after actual Soviet citizens...
...Alexander Tvardovsky, former editor of the literary journal Novy Mir, which in 1962 published Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a book about life in a Stalinist prison camp. Tvardovsky ran a notice in 1966 saying that the first part of Children of the Arbat would appear in 1967. It never did. In 1978 another monthly, Oktyabr, included Children of the Arbat in a list of books to be serialized in 1979. But again the year passed with neither publication nor explanation. The version that begins running this week in Druzhba Narodov, a publication...
Children of the Arbat is a popular success even before its appearance. The manuscript has been read and commented upon by half a dozen newspapers and magazines. Druzhba Narodov long ago stopped selling subscriptions because its limited press run of 150,000 copies has already been sold out. Thousands of would-be readers are on waiting lists for library copies, and subscribers report that friends are begging to read their copies. The black-market price of the April issue of Druzhba Narodov, which sells for 1 ruble 10 kopecks ($1.65), is expected to soar to more than 50 rubles...
After fighting with the Red Army as far as Berlin and winning medals for heroism, Rybakov returned home. "I went to the house at No. 51 Arbat, and suddenly it all came rushing back to me, vivid and strong," he says. "All my friends, my comrades, were gone -- some killed in the war, some killed before ^ it, some gone to other things. I began moving toward the book then...