Word: maximov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Much the same situation dignifies Maximov's novel, A Man Survives (Grove). Seryosha, his young hero, of ten spouts familiar teen-age protests. "I hate the whole world," he shouts at one point. "I hate everybody who has the right to bang his fist on the table, to give marks." But the reader is mistaken who thinks he is listening in on James Dean complaining to Dad because he can't have the family car for a double date. Seryosha's father has been taken away by the NKVD, and the boy has encountered in Joseph Stalin...
With flashbacks, brief jagged confrontations, and dirty language - all of them daring deviations from stodgy stylistic norms in Stalin's time - Maximov tells how the rebellious Seryosha lives as an outlaw on the seamy side of the Soviet establishment, first stealing vegetables to sell on the black market, then working for a smuggler plying the border trade back and forth from Turkey. Eventually he is drafted to fight in World...
...quick images, Maximov slashes a scene in place. His hero, hating the smug, virtuous world, rejects the sympathy of the few kind and decent people he encounters because it is rage itself, he comes to understand, that keeps him alive. "I defend myself against them," he thinks in a rare moment of self-understanding, "with all the fury accumulated in years of wolfish life." Eventually he gives in and accepts society, because he realizes that, bad as it is, it is redeemed by individual acts of humanity...