The Smoke of the Fatherland

The audio version of the novel features Madlen Jabrayilova, Nadezhda Markina, Boris Plotnikov, Igor Kostolevsky, Igor Gordin, Nadezhda Pertseva, Evdokiya Pamfilova, Valery Markin, Tatyana Maksimova, and German Andreev.

From the author: "In 1944, about a year before the end of the Great Patriotic War, I wrote a short novel and called it ‘Smoke of the Fatherland.’ The manuscript of this novel was lost in 1944 under rather complicated circumstances. From the manuscript I have only one chapter left.

Much later, in 1963, in Kaluga my book ‘The Lost Novels’ was published. In it, among other things, I told the story of my three lost novels, including ‘Smoke of the Fatherland.’ Soon after that book came out, I received a letter from Kazan from a reader. She wrote that, working in the State Literary Archive, she accidentally came across the manuscript of ‘Smoke of the Fatherland.’ (...)

This is a novel about our intelligentsia on the eve of and during the last war, about its devotion to the Motherland, its courage, its trials and reflections—and about those undying life phenomena that we call ‘private life,’ sometimes forgetting that there can be no private life outside its time and outside the common life of the country and the people…" Konstantin Paustovsky.