A Hero's Daughter
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Set in the Soviet Union from World War II until the early 1990s, A Hero's Daughter portrays the rise and decline of the Soviet Union through the story of Ivan Dimitrovich Davidov and his family. For his extraordinary bravery and courage beyond the call of duty at the Battle of Stalingrad, Ivan is awarded his country's highest military honor: Hero of the Soviet Union. Married after the war to Tatyana, the medical orderly who found him barely breathing amid a pile of corpses after another apocalyptic battle late in the war, they have a daughter, Olya, who grows up in the glow of her father's reputation.
In 1980, the beautiful Olya, now seventeen, assigned as an interpreter during the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, commits and indiscretion with a French athlete, and throws her straight into the waiting arms of the KGB. As the years roll by, Olya, more and more deeply implicated in espionage, despairs at her fates as a "political prostitute," while her father, equally used by the State, becomes increasingly disillusioned and unruly, until he is arrested for drunken and disorderly conduct. Finally the lives of father and daughter intersect in an utterly moving and heartrending conclusion.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Russian-born, Paris-based Makine vaulted into prominence with his fourth novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers, which won France's two most prestigious literary prizes. Since then, along with newer novels (most recently Music of a Life), a steady stream of his earlier work has appeared in English. Here, in his first published book, he provides an early glimpse at one of his recurring themes: the way the Soviet system prostituted literally, in some cases its most promising citizens. Ivan Demidov is an official Hero of the Soviet Union, a distinction he earned in the bloody defense of Moscow during WWII. Since then, he has worn the Hero's Gold Star, which earns him the respect of other citizens and the very practical right to extra rations at understocked grocery stores. For a while, he is celebrated in propagandistic television programs and asked to make patriotic speeches at elementary schools, until newer Heroes from the fighting in Afghanistan take his place. His talented daughter, Olya, is trained as an interpreter but sent to work at the governmental International Trade Center, where educated, attractive Russians "entertain" foreigners on whom the KGB wishes to spy. There are signs of inexperience here: Ivan and Olya are less fully realized characters than walking metaphors for Soviet exploitation. But present in this ably translated work are the seeds of the powerful social criticism that flowers in Makine's more mature novels.
