Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
They are virtual brothers, Arkady and Alyosha, young pioneers in Stalin's postwar world, marching to the clarion call of socialism, to the stirring beat of the drums. The future, they are assured, is bright and beautiful. But what, then, are those endless miles of barbed wire they encounter everywhere along their route?
This is the moving, two-generational tale of two families, those of Yakov Zinger and Pyotr Yevdokimov, fathers of the two young pioneers. Inseparable, the two men have been through the grueling war against the Germans, with all its horror and senseless carnage. Yakov—or Yasha, as he was known—emerged physically intact but scarred forever "from the moment he had been lifted out of a mountain of frozen bodies at a camp in liberated Poland.” Pyotr, a skilled sniper who operated behind the German lines, lost both his legs, not at the hands of the Germans, but as a result of an artillery "mistake" by his own forces. Together, in these postwar, Cold War years, the two families try to piece together their shattered lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"It was all so simple. Crystal clear... " begins this chronicle of the ebb in the fortunes of Marxist true believers. However, life in post-WWII Russia, where Makine's slim, impressionistic novel is set, is anything but simple or crystal clear. The story revolves around the families of two soldiers, Yakov Zinger and Pyotr Yevdokimov. Both are disabled and aging now, the butt of jokes with their endless recounting of the horrors and triumphs of the war as seen through Russian eyes. The narrator, Yevdokimov's unnamed son and a future writer, tells of his childhood in a town near Leningrad where a Young Pioneer spirit flares up out of the ashes of WWII. Loitering near the mysteriously dark water-filled "Pit," and the "Gap," an apex of the triangular courtyard where the locals reminisce and play dominoes, the narrator listens to his elders' war stories, about Byelorussia, American GIs, the German-Polish border. At first, he and his friends are bursting with enthusiasm to launch "the age of radiant years" globally, bringing Britain and "the Soviet Socialist Republic of America" into the Communist fold. But obsessed by the threat of atomic war and disturbed by murmurings about Stalin's rampages, community rage prompts first a vicious assault on the bones of German soldiers and then the definitive break-up of the domino game. The narrator says good-bye to his best friend (who he will never see again) and heads off to the Suronov military academy. This is an early work of Makine's, written before Dreams of My Russian Summers and published in France in 1992. In the genre of confessional novel, it is at once a reconstruction of a certain postwar Russian milieu and a bittersweet paean to the Communist past; above all, it's a passionate ode to political dreaming even as the perceived oppressor changes.
