Good Night, Sweet Dreams

11 hrs. 12 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Jiří Kratochvil

Narrator Sergey Dadyko

Description

The three main characters of the novel — Konstantin, the stepson of a Russian émigré and a lover of Russian culture, the Czech Jakub, and the Jewish youth Jindřich, whose parents were killed by the Nazis — find themselves in Brno on one of the last days of the war, April 30, 1945. The city center has already been cleared of the occupiers, although fighting is still going on in the outskirts. Prisoners are returning from concentration camps, but their homes are occupied by others. There is no electricity in the city, the water supply is destroyed, and the dead are being buried in parks and gardens. Chaos and uncertainty about tomorrow reign, and the narrative fills with magic and allegory. Yet the city is still alive: by some miracle a circus has survived in it, with dwarfs, a trained bear, and a “blind” tightrope walker who has blindfolded herself so as not to see human sorrow... It is there that all three heroes of the book meet, only to part forever afterward, each toward his own fate.