Word: arbat
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This week an obscure literary journal, Druzhba Narodov (Friendship of Peoples), will publish the first of three monthly installments of Anatoli Rybakov's startling novel, Children of the Arbat, which takes place during Stalin's reign of terror. The publication has been eagerly anticipated by Soviet intellectuals for more than a year, and many are hailing it as the literary event of their generation. People who have already read the novel are heaping praise on it. "This is a great book, a great moment in our literature," declared Poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko. "Rybakov was the man to do this...
Children of the Arbat sheds light on the dark corner of Soviet history when Stalin ruled his country through fear. The title refers to a circle of young friends who live with their families in a building at 51 Arbat Street, near the center of Moscow. The main character is Sasha Pankratov, a Young Communist League leader at an engineering institute. He is arrested on an obviously false political charge, interrogated by the secret police of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) and sentenced to Siberian exile. Some of his friends try to organize a protest petition. A few people...
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...
...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...
...quickly became clear that Soviet authorities were not ready to extend glasnost to freedom of assembly. Every morning for the rest of the week, gangs of thugs showed up on Arbat Street and roughed up demonstrators and journalists who were covering the protests. The government blamed the troublemaking on right-wing hooligans known locally as lyubers, though most demonstrators suspected the authorities of connivance...