Live Like Everyone Else

Anatoly Marchenko told everything about himself himself. He spoke clearly and harshly, with his characteristic precise way of perceiving each situation, but at the same time with uncompromising exposure of its inner moral meaning and the real price of everything he describes. However, his books are not about himself—they’re about all of us: about the country, about the world in which each of us, in our own way, has adapted to live. And the author’s biography—prison and camp years, exile and supervision—doesn’t make up the meaning of his account; it’s only a chain of vivid examples, a reliable report from an eyewitness and a victim. That’s why, amid today’s flow of “camp” literature—already experiencing some inflation in the reader’s perception (as if we’ve read about this “enough,” that’s it)—these three small books should not, and I think cannot, get lost and dissolve. In addition to the unquestionable value of each truthful testimony about the backstage tragic sides of our recent existence, they also have a special significance and dignity that belong only to them.