The Glimmer of a Bonfire

“The Firebrand Glow” (1965) is a documentary novella about a father (a Don Cossack) and about bloody events on the Don. For the writer, the father embodied the man of an idea—fully devoted to the revolution. The romance of that tumultuous era still predominates in the novella, despite all its brutality. A restrained account of real facts is accompanied by lyrical digressions (the lyrical quality associated with Tрифонов is inseparably linked to the image of time passing, changing the face of the world). In the action—set sometimes in 1904 (the year the father joined the Bolshevik party), sometimes in 1917 or 1937—the very thickness of time is revealed, its layered nature.
After Stalin’s death, the thaw was replaced by a new advance of cold; and the novella miraculously slipped through the narrow gap of the shuttered censor’s door into the literature of truth.