Georgii Vladimov (Book order)

Georgii Vladimov Book order

Georgi Vladimov emerged as a promising young Russian writer, representing new hope for Soviet literature during the de-Stalinization thaw. His early works, though often set against industrial backdrops, were praised for their unconventional portrayals of individual characters. Vladimov became renowned as a dissident of immense moral courage, with his allegorical novel 'Faithful Ruslan' standing as a defining literary text of the post-Stalin era, reflecting the nation's moral confusion. His later writings explored the cruelty and absurdity within the Red Army, leading to further censorship and his eventual emigration.

Faithful Ruslan

224 pages
8 hours of reading

4.5(7)Add rating

Unavailable for twenty years, this harrowing allegory of obedience to authority is esteemed as “one of the defining literary texts of the post-Stalin period.” (The Guardian) Set in a remote Siberian depot immediately following the demolition of one of the gulag’s notorious camps and the emancipation of its prisoners, Faithful Ruslan is an embittered cri de coeur from a writer whose circumstances obliged him to resist the violence of arbitrary power. “Every writer who writes anything in this country is made to feel he has committed a crime,” Georgi Vladimov said. Dissident, he said, is a word that “they force on you.” His mother, a victim of Stalin’s anti-Semitic policy, had been interred for two years in one of the camps from which Vladimov derived the wrenching detail of Faithful Ruslan. The novel circulated in samizdat for more than a decade, often attributed to Solzhenitsyn, before its publication in the West led to Vladimov’s harassment and exile. A starving stray, tortured and abandoned by the godlike “Master” whom he has unconditionally loved, Ruslan and his cadre of fellow guard dogs dutifully wait for the arrival of new prisoners—but the unexpected arrival of a work party provokes a climactic bloodletting. Fashioned from the perceptions of an uncomprehending animal, Vladimov’s insistently ironic indictment of the gulag spirals to encompass all of Man’s inexplicable cruelty.