Ordeal, Book One

The novel opens by inviting you to hate the city it is set in. A thoughtful stranger newly arrived in Petersburg walks the straight misty streets past bleak unlighted houses, looks up at the Peter-Paul Cathedral, so un-Russian in its dizzying height, and into faces pale and careworn, with eyes as sombre as the city itself. Tolstoy then offers him two options and only two: huddle deeper into his coat-collar, or tell himself it would not be a bad idea to deliver a crashing blow and shatter all this petrified magic into smithereens.

The Sisters is the first book of Ordeal, the trilogy that carries Katya and Dasha Bulavin and the men around them from the salons of 1914 through the war and into the revolution. It is the most readable large Soviet novel of its generation, written by a count who left Russia and came back.

The translation is by Ivy and Tatiana Litvinov, and that is not a detail to pass over. Ivy Litvinov was born Ivy Therese Low in England in 1889 and married Maxim Litvinov, the revolutionary exile who became the Soviet Union's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. After his death in 1951 she turned seriously to translation and produced some twenty-five volumes of Russian fiction in English.

The text is the Progress Publishers printing of 1965, reproduced complete, with a new critical introduction written for this edition.