Disappearance. A Brief Stay in the Torture Chamber

6 hrs. 53 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Yury Trifonov

Narrator Vyacheslav Gerasimov

Description

The unfinished novel “The Disappearance” is devoted to the repression of the 1930s that destroyed those who nurtured and carried out the October Revolution—its situations and characters are autobiographical.

Spoiler

Yuri Trifonov grew up in a family of professional revolutionaries—Civil War commissars, responsible officials in responsible institutions, residents of that very “house on the embankment,” which would later become the title of his famous novel. His father organized the Red Guard in pre-revolutionary Petrograd, was a member of the Revolutionary Military Councils of the Eastern and Southern Fronts, and led the legendary operation to transport from Ekaterinodar to the Urals the “gold of the republic” — coins and bullion worth several million in those days’ rubles; he created the Kama military flotilla, and built the first armored trains. For Yuri, his father was the highest moral authority. But life together was not destined to last long. In 1937, the father was arrested, and half a year later the mother was arrested as “a family member of a traitor to the Motherland.” Notably, in the questionnaires of that time preserved in archives, the Komsomol member and aspiring writer Yuri Trifonov invariably emphasized the father’s revolutionary merits and his prominent public position—what, by those times’ standards, sounded like a daring provocation. And he tried not to say anything about the fate that befell him, though it sometimes turned into serious trouble. At the beginning of 1951, for example, during the loud success of “The Students,” he filled out two questionnaires—one for the Committee for Stalin Prizes and another for joining the Union of Writers. In the first, everything matched the “letter” of the times (which, by the way, did not prevent awarding the prize). In the second, not a word about the arrest—only that the father “died in May 1941” (in fact, in 1938 the family received no precise notification). Someone noticed and reported him, and a scandal broke out. The Komsomol organization of the Literary Institute—which Trifonov had already graduated from, but where he was still registered for Komsomol membership—issued him a reprimand with a warning (at first they intended to expel him). This event was later described in Trifonov’s story “A Brief Stay in a Torture Chamber,” where there are the words: “A weak book suddenly received a prize. So it was sweet to exclude me. And there was a reason: I hid in the questionnaire that my father was an enemy of the people, which I never believed”