Even during her lifetime, Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova (1909–2010) was called one of the great widows. For forty years she first waited for Isaac Babel’s return—who had been arrested by the NKVD in 1939—then, as the first after the dictator’s death, secured her husband’s posthumous rehabilitation. She “pushed through” his works, gathered memories about him, and wrote her own.
In them she tried “to restore the features of a person endowed with great spiritual kindness, a passionate interest in people, and the wonderful gift of portraying them….”
That wonderful gift was given also to A. N. Pirozhkova herself. She had a direct role in creating the “grand style”; her engineering pen produced masterpieces of the Moscow metro—stations “Ploshchad Revolyutsii,” “Paveletskaya,” and two “Kievskaya” stations. This book is also, in a way, a “grand style.” Siberia, Moscow, the Caucasus, Europe—and, in essence, the entire 20th century. The memoir heroes—along with Babel, beside Babel, after Babel—include S. Eisenstein, S. Mikhoels, Y. Erdman, Y. Olesha, E. Peshkova, I. Ehrenburg, colleagues—well-known metro-construction engineers, public figures Avel Enukidze and Betal Kalmikov. And alongside them—ordinary people, regardless of rank or title—just as in Babel’s way.