"The Sun of the Dead" is an epic by Ivan Shmelev, devoted to the events of the fratricidal Civil War and the Red Terror in Crimea, portraying the triumph of evil, hunger, banditry, and the gradual loss of human shape. “It’s such truth that you can’t call it art. In Russian literature, it’s the first time-based true testimony about Bolshevism. Who else conveyed such despair and the all-encompassing ruin of the first Soviet years, of military communism?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn