Point of No Return

Vladimir Markovich Sanin (1929—1989) wrote about people who chose a difficult and dangerous path in life—polar explorers, firefighters, travelers. And he himself belonged to the same restless human breed: as a very young Sanin he managed to take part in the Great Patriotic War; after the war he finished the Economics Faculty of Moscow State University, worked for a newspaper, became a writer, and more than once went beyond the Arctic Circle—to the Arctic and Antarctica. The plots of his works are often based on real events, unfolding in non-trivial circumstances and closed communities (such as, for example, a ship’s crew or an avalanche station).

The story of the novella is based on the forced landing of an airplane on drifting ice off the coast of Severnaya Zemlya, the struggle for the lives of the crew and passengers in the harsh conditions of the polar night.