The Winter's Hero

This is a sequel to Aksyonov's Generations of Winter, a book that I thoroughly enjoyed when I read it a few years ago; it traced the history of the Gradov family from the time of the death of Lenin and the power struggle that saw Stalin emerge, through the collectivization and Great Purges of the 30s, into the war, and ended with the victory over Germany; or one could say that it encapsulated a history of the Soviet Union in that period through the lives of the Gradov family. A friend who read Generations on my advice said that she found the family too unbelieveable in that its members captured the full spectrum: the old Russain patriarch (Boris Gradov, eminent physician who even treats Stalin at one point), then through the children show more and their lovers/partners one had the fervent Marxist, the counterrevolutionary, those purged in the 30s and sent off to Siberia to be rehabilitated when they talents were needed by the military during the war, the orphan adopted out of the horrors of the collectivization of agriculture and the great famine and suffering that followed it, and the ethereal types who lived for literature or music and tried to pretend that the nightmare around them did not exist. A valid point, but I thought that Aksyonov brought it off well in Generations, and I don't doubt that there were extended families that lived through those sorts of experiences; they were times that forced some people to make choices, even if the choice was to try to opt out.

This book is more compressed in time scale: from the end of the war to the death of Stalin in 1953. It follows the lives of a number of people whom we met in Generations, in particular Boris IV, grandson of the doctor and son of the famous Marshal Gradov killed at the end of the war, who focuses first on becoming a national sportsman through motorcylce racing, but then enters medical school; Nina, the daughter of Boris the doctor, unrepentent Trotskyite and her new husband a Georgain painter, Sandro Pevzner, both of whom run afoul of the authorities; Kirill, son of Boris converted Christian who decides to continue to live in Siberia even after his release from the camps and who is joined by his wife, Cecilia, the continuing true believer so steeped in Marxist dogma that she cannot see the reality about her; plus cameo appearances by Stalin and more often by Beria who hunts pretty young women on Moscow streets and has them taken to his house for dinner and rape.

Winter's Hero does not work as well as a novel. With authorial asides, surrealistic touches involving a cat, a toad, and an elephant, and the general feel of the book, it is more of a vehicle for the author to explain and castigate the Soviet system with its fear and oppression, the machinery of the "organs", the paranoia, the unbridled use of power and hence total lack of moral authority or moral constraints. This, I think, is well done, and I found it interesting, but I wonder if others would without some understanding or knowledge of that time and the Soviet system. Aksyonov shows well how the "Doctors' Plot" was leading to the a wide-scale pogram with the forced re-settlement of millions of Jews in the Soviet Union, and which was effectively stopped only with the death of Stalin. It is that same death that saves Doctor Gradov who has been arrested and tortured for having had the courage to speak out in a public meeting against the arrest and slander of Jewish colleagues accused of all sorts of infamy. It is an action for which Boris realizes he will likely pay with his life, but it is a moral victory that goes some way to compensating for a weakness in his younger days when the "organs" forced him to certify as natural the death of a rising political leader that he knew to be deliberate. show less

1925-1953, la famille Gradov sous trois générations pendant l’ère stalinienne. Dans la capitale, sur les champs de bataille ou au goulag, ils sont médecins, poète, peintre ou général, ils adhèrent au régime en place, l’utilisent ou le subissent. Un roman fleuve (plus de 1600 pages) historique et romanesque, non exempt de longueurs ou de passages difficiles pour qui n’est pas bien au courant des pensées et faits historiques, mais qui emporte le lecteur tel un ”Guerre et Paix” du 20e siècle.