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The novel ends with a one-legged man beaten to death by three soldiers in an empty town. Matveyev fights all three on crutches. A crutch snaps. He spits blood and says, "I can't manage without crutches. One of them's broken." Then he sees his horse, with the white heart-shaped mark on its brow, and swings into the saddle and rides down the long moonlit road.
The horse is a dying man's hallucination and the book knows it. "His vanity was satisfied for the last time." Under that line stands a date: 1928.
A Komsomol organiser's novel of the Civil War in the Far East, written by a young man who was very good and did not get to become anything else. Victor Kin was a pen-name. He was arrested in November 1937 as an enemy of the people, shot in April 1938, and rehabilitated in 1956.
This is the barest volume in the whole strand, and the bareness is the point. No date of publication, no copyright line, no colophon, no printer's imprint, and not one word about the author. A reader learns his name from the title page and nothing else for 252 pages. The state that shot him put his novel into English and sold it abroad under his own name, and gave the foreign reader no biographical note at all. Not a falsified one. None.
Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, in the Library of Soviet Literature, undated. Translated by Ralph Parker and Valentina Scott.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
The horse is a dying man's hallucination and the book knows it. "His vanity was satisfied for the last time." Under that line stands a date: 1928.
A Komsomol organiser's novel of the Civil War in the Far East, written by a young man who was very good and did not get to become anything else. Victor Kin was a pen-name. He was arrested in November 1937 as an enemy of the people, shot in April 1938, and rehabilitated in 1956.
This is the barest volume in the whole strand, and the bareness is the point. No date of publication, no copyright line, no colophon, no printer's imprint, and not one word about the author. A reader learns his name from the title page and nothing else for 252 pages. The state that shot him put his novel into English and sold it abroad under his own name, and gave the foreign reader no biographical note at all. Not a falsified one. None.
Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, in the Library of Soviet Literature, undated. Translated by Ralph Parker and Valentina Scott.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.