The Tartar Steppe

7 hrs. 22 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Dino Buzzati

Narrator Oleg Buldakov

Description

With his first assignment, Lieutenant Drego arrives at a remote fortress surrounded on one side by sands and on the other by an impassable mountain range. The garrison’s task is to repel a possible attack by a formidable enemy lurking somewhere in the desert. Some officers still wait for the assault; others already simply don’t believe it will ever happen…

The novel is written in the style of Kafkaesque traditions, using the method of endless postponement that the Eleatics and Kafka often employed. But if the atmosphere in Kafka’s novels is grey—oppressive, filled with meaninglessness and everyday routine, with bureaucracy and boredom—then in “The Tatar Desert” you can feel, in everything, the anticipation of something, though it is the anticipation of a gigantic battle that is frightening and long-awaited. On its pages, Dino Buzzati returns the novel to its ancient source— the epic. The desert here is both reality and symbol: it is boundless, and the hero awaits an horde, countless as sand.