Instead of a preface
I’d like to offer the readers short plots from the “Unwritten Novels,” which will never become novels—alas, I won’t have time.
In the novellas there is no fiction: they are built on meetings with living witnesses and participants in the events described.
A writer is not a prosecutor. He has the right to his own version of history, although the supreme right of an impartial judge belongs precisely to History. A desire for unambiguous assessments hides either self-doubt or fear of the thought itself. Only those conclusions that a person reaches on his own alone form his moral stance.
The main thing that occupied me while working on this piece was the problem of unlimited power in the years now called the period of the cult of personality.
The mechanics of such power—its unbending and uncontrollable will, reducing a citizen of a great country to the level of a mere “cog”—that is the tragic and alarming thing, and that is what should be analyzed first of all—without anger and without bias.
Understanding this kind of phenomenon should help each of us develop civic resistance to even the lightest recurrence of the possibility of something like it being reborn in one form or another.
Contents:
Novellas
Hold on to the clouds!
Mr. Bolshevik
The Life of Commissar Ivanov
Short stories
The Execution of the Ataman
Night Duty
Unwritten Novels
37–56. Summer of ’37
Autumn of ’52
That night in Yaroslavl
A soldier’s fate in America
The Eve of May Day
The First Day of Freedom
Long live Voroshilov, or the Thoughts of a Tired Man
Duklo