Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...sentenced to Siberian exile. Some of his friends try to organize a protest petition. A few people sign it, but most find excuses not to. One of them becomes an informer for the NKVD and finally a full-fledged agent. Some of the most vivid scenes in the novel are detailed descriptions of NKVD investigations, arrests and interrogations...
...book ends with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party leader, whose death in 1934 was used by Stalin as an excuse to launch the bloodiest of the purges. The novel strongly suggests, as do a number of Western historians, that Stalin was responsible for the murder...
...announced that this book would be published. Both times it was stopped. This time I believe it will succeed." For all those 20 years Rybakov rejected offers to publish it in the West despite the frustration of repeated rejection by Soviet authorities. "My people and my country need this novel," he says. "It must be published at home before it is published abroad...
...went through the Lubyanka and Butyrka," Rybakov says, referring to the main prison processing centers in Moscow for political prisoners. From the Butyrka interrogation, which he describes in considerable detail in the novel, he was sent into exile in a series of villages in western Siberia. Rybakov shows a visitor photographs of himself as a handsome, dark-haired young man with laughing eyes. Then he shows photos of a grim, tired, middle-aged-looking man with dead eyes. "The difference was only one year between these pictures," he explains. "I was very depressed after the arrest, for I had done...