Georgi Vladimov,Michael Glenny
Unavailable for twenty years, this harrowing allegory of obedience to authority is esteemed as â€œone of the defining literary texts of the post-Stalin period.â€ (,The Guardian,),Set in a remote Siberian depot immediately following the demolition of one of the gulagâ€™s notorious camps and the emancipation of its prisoners, ,Faithful Ruslan, is an embittered ,cri de coeur, from a writer whose circumstances obliged him to resist the violence of arbitrary power. â€œEvery writer who writes anything in this country is made to feel he has committed a crime,â€ Georgi Vladimov said. ,Dissident,, he said, is a word that â€œthey force on you.â€ His mother, a victim of Stalinâ€™s anti-Semitic policy, had been interred for two years in one of the camps from which Vladimov derived the wrenching detail of ,Faithful Ruslan,. The novel circulated in ,samizdat, for more than a decade, often attributed to Solzhenitsyn, before its publication in the West led to Vladimovâ€™s harassment and exile. ,A starving stray, tortured and abandoned by the godlike â€œMasterâ€ whom he has unconditionally loved, Ruslan and his cadre of fellow guard dogs dutifully wait for the arrival of new prisonersâ€”but the unexpected arrival of a work party provokes a climactic bloodletting. Fashioned from the perceptions of an uncomprehending animal, Vladimovâ€™s insistently ironic indictment of the gulag spirals to encompass all of Manâ€™s inexplicable cruelty.
Fiction,Cultural,Russia,Literature,Russian Literature,Historical,Historical Fiction,Animals,Animals,Dogs,Literature,Novels,Historical,Classics
Faithful Ruslan