Derzhavin, or The Fall of an Empire

Yury Dombrovsky (1909–1978) was a prose writer and poet who went through several arrests, camps, exiles—and did not break. The author of novels “The Monkey Comes for Its Skull,” “The Keeper of Antiquities,” “The Faculty of Useless Things,” “The Birth of a Mouse.” “Derzhavin, or the Collapse of the Empire” is his first and unfinished novel, published in 1937–1938, which now seems impossible for those years, in the journal “Literary Kazakhstan.” A young lieutenant Gavriil Derzhavin (still an unknown poet and not an important statesman) must catch the rebellious convict Pugachev, who calls himself the name of the deceased emperor. Dombrovsky’s Derzhavin does not want to be an executioner, but he also isn’t planning to step away from the existing order—he is “a man of laws,” and he sees that “everywhere is treason.”
“But rebellions,” Derzhavin said, “but blood flooding the earth, but fires—gibbets—did you know what you were doing? You, educated as you are—how could you lead this blinded crowd after you?”
“Dombrovsky peered into the abyss of the relations between fate and the poet, genius and villainy.”
“Derzhavin” is not a romanticized biography, but an energetic debut, full of sharp situations and pervaded by a high-voltage current.”
Yury Davydov