The Exchange and Other Stories (European Classics)

The main achievement of Trifonov's three decades in literature is a series of short novels from the late 1960s and 1970s about the Russian intelligentsia: The Exchange, Preliminary Stocktaking, The Long Goodbye, Another Life, The House on the Embankment, and The Old Man. In them he explores human relationships in the problematic urban existence show more close to the heart of all ordinary Russian readers: exchange of apartments, competition for careers, money troubles, and so on. The novels are also a longer-term investigation, through flashbacks and reminiscences, of the Stalin period and its disastrous effects on society. Disappearance, begun in the 1950s and clearly written "for the drawer" (with no expectations of publication), appeared posthumously. It takes up some of the same themes, such as mass arrests during the period 1937 to 1942, of Trifonov's other works, but much more explicitly. (Bowker Author Biography) show less