Word: rybakov
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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...
...before Rybakov could tackle it, he built a successful career as a children's novelist, winning praise for his first novel, The Dirk, in 1950 and following it with a sequel, The Bronze Bird, in 1956. Next came two more teen stories, The Adventures of Krosh and Krosh's Vacation, written in the early 1960s...
...then the country was in the midst of the cultural thaw of Khrushchev's destalinization, a time of extraordinary ferment in the arts. Rybakov wrote an 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...
...people would voice powerful objections. The book's characters represent a cross section of Soviet society of the Stalinist era. Those who lived through it can see themselves in the story, and the portrait is not always pretty. "There is much that will be appearing for the first time," Rybakov said. "Many people of my generation will recognize themselves. This is an important step politically...
...Rybakov intends to take two more such political and literary steps. "I have already started the next part of the story, with the working title 1935 and Other Years. That will go through 1938," he says. "Then I want to write a third volume to cover the war. If God grants me six more years...