Word: arbat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...spectacular thaw has got under way in the cultural domain. During the past year more than a dozen previously banned movies have been screened before fascinated audiences. On the stage, plays like Mikhail Shatrov's Dictatorship of Conscience examine past failures of Communism. Anatoli Rybakov's Children of the Arbat, a novel that chronicles the murderous Stalinist purges of the 1930s, appeared in a literary journal after going unpublished for two decades. Last month a group of ex-political prisoners and dissident writers applied for permission to publish their own magazine, aptly titled Glasnost. The government has so far given...
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...
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...
...anti-Stalinist novel, Summer in Sosnyak, about a girl whose parents were killed in the 1937 purges. It was relatively mild politically and appeared in Novy Mir but was later suppressed until the publication of Rybakov's collected works in 1982. In 1964 he started Children of the Arbat, but by that time the thaw was over and the long twilight of the Brezhnev era was setting in. "Tvardovsky, the courageous Novy Mir editor, told me, 'I'm a great fan and admirer of yours, but I can't do a thing,' " Rybakov says. "He said the magazine...