The Vanquished. Book 2

28 hrs. 40 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Irina Golovkina

Narrator Elena Lebedeva

Description

“The Defeated” by Irina Vladimirovna Golovkina is a novel about the life of Russian intelligentsia during Stalin’s dictatorship. The author writes: “In this work there isn’t a single invented fact—something that wouldn’t have been taken by me from the surrounding reality of the 1930s and 1940s.” But for all its documentary nature, the novel is still a work of art, not a simple chronicle of real events.

In Russia, the Civil War has ended. The country is destroyed, many people have died—because of the war, hunger, diseases, and devastation; many ended up in emigration. Left behind were people of the so-called “former”—those who survived this terrible whirlpool: mostly widows, children, and elderly people. Many of them never reconciled themselves to the new power, but they still had to live and raise children and grandchildren who were not accepted into educational institutions, were fired from jobs, and sometimes sent to camps. Hunger, unemployment, humiliations, and anxieties darkened the rest of their lives, but just as icy water tempers hot steel, the catastrophes of revolution only froze, strengthened in some people the principles of aristocracy, and reignited a fading Orthodox faith, shaking love for the homeland. A kind of internal conscious and unconscious opposition to everything brought by the new era appeared.

With astonishing simplicity and clarity, without any vulgarity, the author managed to tell the tragic pages of the country’s history. Thousands of people were arrested and exiled very far from their native places; many never returned. Faith, character, and upbringing helped those imprisoned or exiled to stand their ground, and those who were destined to die to do so with their heads held high—unvanquished. And the hearts of those who were still alive remained in that old Russia. Its image, distant—separated from them by a few decades of nightmare—was associated with childhood and peaceful life, where everything was exactly as it should be for people.