"The best thing ever written about 1905. What a shame nobody knows this book". — these are the words of B. Pasternak.
The novel "Viktor Vavich" by Boris Stepanovich Zhitkov (1882–1938) was considered by the author to be the work of his life. He worked on it for more than five years. During the writer’s lifetime, only separate parts of his "encyclopedia of Russian life" from the time of the first Russian revolution were published. In this work, our beloved Zhitkov from childhood is easy to recognize—witty, precise, and relentlessly detail-oriented; free and laconic in his language. At the same time, we are presented with a book by an unknown master, following the traditions of the European adventure and the Russian psychological novel.
The print run of the complete edition of "Viktor Vavich" was cut short in the autumn of 1941, after a devastating internal review by A. Fadeev. The copy from which, sixty years after the author’s death, one of the best Russian books of the twentieth century is finally being published, was preserved by Zhitkov’s friend and scholar of his work, Lidia Korneyevna Chukovskaya.