Customer Reviews

The Winter's Hero : A Novel

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This book is really every bit the equal of its predecessor (Generations of Winter), to paraphrase Kirkus Reviews. I actually prefer this volume and Generations over most of Aksyonov's other "fantantic" tales, primarily because I'm more fond of the realistic and essentially optimistic tradition in Russian literature. These two books are practically in the same league as the great novels of Tolstoy and Sholohov.

Touted as on a par with WAR AND PEACE, also written by a Russian, this novel is red in every way. The binding is even a vivid red, the most prominent color of the book jacket, also. Published by Random House, this followup to a former major saga of Russian hierachy is by the author of eight previous novels.

He uses a lyrical manner in mingling fiction with historical characters (my favorite reading at the moment), this sequel and conclusion to GENERATIONS OF WINTER brings to life the major Russian leaders of which we have heard. It is a game of shadows and light filled with Kremlin secrets and escapes from prison and labor camps in Russia by some of the characters, illuminating the Soviet experience with history of the Soviet Union.

This story follows the descendants of the Moscow surgeon Boris Gradov, who held a high-ranking medical position which puts him in the same surroundings with such as Lenin (original name, Ulyanov), Stalin who used the pseudonym meaning "Steel" and originally Dzhugashvili and it projects that he had six toes on his left foot, and others just as important.

Nicholas II was the last Russian czar and was executed in 1918. He is a peripheral figure, as is later Khrushchev (whom we all remember as taking off his shoe at the United Nations and hitting it on a table for the world to see). The marvelous composer, Rimsky-Korsakov was also involved like so many others with the strange names so hard to pronounce but even harder to spell.

The hero of the Gradov family was termed a "modern-day Titan." Simile was the means to describe unthought of happenings; it is hard to decide whether they might have happened or are just figments of one's imagination.

The translators used descriptive terms and phrasing for mundane things. John Glad had previously taught Russian literature at the University of Chicago, my son Geoffrey's alma mater. Christopher D. Morris resided in Prague, a place where our inimitable editor of the alternative weekly paper in Knoxville, Barry Henderson, had held forth.

Vassily Aksyonov teaches at a university in Virginia and could not get published in the Soviet Union. Besides writing fiction, he is a dramatist and screenwriter. He remembers that Stalin, before becoming paranoid, used the cinema for the masses on a political and spiritual level in the spirit of socialism.

Sometimes the long, strangely-spelled Russian names got in the way of the story but overall it was a good eye's veiw of Russian life and politics.

Great book! Aksyonov continues the story from "Generations of Winter" in his own unique style. Any fan of Russian authors should give this book a read. Received the product on time and in good condition.

Not much of this book sticks in the mind, atypically for an Aksyonov novel. The titanically horrific events of the preceding volume, _Generations of Winter_, practically carried the story along without help. The comparatively (but only comparatively) milder post-war times in the Soviet Union don't leave much for historical fiction to hinge on. So Aksyonov chooses to emphasize the degradation that the long years of war, terror, and compulsory adulation of Stalin and the Party inflicted on the Soviet people. He doesn't pull it off; it's the story and the reader that get degraded. Stick with the first volume of this tale.