Word: seryozha
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...immemorial unrevolutionary manner of all grannies everywhere, this old Russian woman is giving soothing reassurance to her little grandson Seryozha, who has been developing adolescent doubts about the state religion. They are characters in The Trial Begins, perhaps the most remarkable novel to have come out of Russia since the Revolution 43 years...
...nger. At one point in the story, an official jeers at an idealist: "You reformers! I suppose you'd like to see a kindly socialism, a free form of slavery . . .?" That is the vision that addles the heads of the two principal characters in the subplot-the student Seryozha and his girl Katya. Seryozha dreams of "a new world Communist and radiant" in which "top wages would be paid to cleaning women. Cabinet ministers would be kept on short rations to make sure of their disinterested motives. Money, torture and thievery would be abolished." Alas, he too is fatally...
This pathetic revolution against revolution is doomed, of course, and Seryozha, betrayed by his girl, winds up in the same labor camp as Dr. Rabinovich. But he devoutly keeps his faith in "The Aim." Each day Seryozha insists that he and his friends pool the rations, only to divide the bread equally all over again in the evening. It is, he explains with mad Russian logic, the principle that matters. And it is indeed the Russianness of The Trial Begins, rather than its prickly polemics, that most impresses the Western reader...
Swift Visions. With great and often savage wit, the book reduces major philosophical questions to potted, page-long parables. Seryozha, for instance, loses his faith in God (Stalin) because, when he goes out with his school comrades to harvest potatoes, he discovers that the "electric plows" of Soviet propaganda do not exist. The insomniac Karlinsky wonders why death has not yet been abolished. And to match his vision of "The Future," one would have to go back to the indignatio saeva of Swift himself...