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Title: OLD MAN by Yuri Trifonov, Jacqueline Edwards, Mitchell Schneider ISBN: 0-671-25283-6 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 19 October, 1984 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95

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Average Customer Rating: 2.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: For specialists only
Comment: The reviewer who says that this novel hasn't weathered the test of time got it right. Even as someone with a fair amount of background in the literature and history of twentieth-century Russia, I couldn't make it through this one. The plot (such as it is) alternates between the question of whether a particular Cossack leader in the Civil War was loyal to the Bolshevik cause or "merely" a Cossack nationalist and the machinations of several couples to acquire rights to a dacha, circa 1980. Fighting through the former requires a high level of interest in the various parties to the Civil War, and struggling through the latter requires a high degree of willingess to ponder Soviet law pertaining to the occupation of property. Throughout, the plot is thin and the character development virtually nonexistent. The reader gets a large platefull of arcane details that, I suspect, will primarily be of interest to historians and literary specialists of the Civil War period. (Or, as the other reviewer suggests, to those who focus on the literature of the Brezhnev era.)

I found Trifonov's "Another Life" similarly unreadable but I did enjoy "The House on the Embankment," the story of a man who conveniently looked the other way whenever his friends found trouble during Stalin's reign.

Rating: 3
Summary: "Aging revolutionary queries former gung-ho actions"
Comment: Though book blurb descriptions often exaggerate, the person who linked Tolstoy and Turgenev to Yuri Trifonov on the cover of my edition of THE OLD MAN was a true master of hyperbole...This lightweight tale of an old civil war veteran who survived purges, battles, disease, starvation, and exile to grow old by the 1970s may evoke sympathy on human grounds, it may arouse awareness of what the generation of 1917 in Russia went through, and it may bring to mind the paltry reward such suffering brought...I cannot say that this book will fascinate many readers in the world today, but that is not to say that it has (or rather HAD), no merit.

THE OLD MAN is above all a book that has not weathered time very well. It belongs to the Brezhnev era of the now-extinct Soviet Union, a time when speaking the truth was a risky act, if not as life-endangering as it had been under Stalin. Most authors preferred to play it safe and write works that did not challenge the official version of history or contemporary life. Trifonov deserves all credit for bringing a breath of fresh air into the stifled literary climate of those days. But if telling the truth about Party and individual behavior during the Civil War of 1918-1921 and showing the corruption and cynicism of later generations was attractive and courageous in 1980, it is not extremely startling today. No one now, in Russia or in the West, need remain in doubt about historical events or...mistakes (not to mention crimes) committed in the name of the Revolution. The old man himself was part of those crimes, committed perhaps in the fervent ardor of the desire for change, even forgotten by perpetrators, but crimes nevertheless. People lost all individual merit and were lumped into classes, pro or con. The Soviet Union was built on rigid class definitions, but by the 1970s, new classes had sprung up, the old did not matter. Trifonov notes (p.189) "The pharmacist's approach to humanity---or, more exactly, to individuals---survived for decades, for there is nothing more convenient than cut-and-dried formulas, but now everything has grown turbid. The vials have been broken and all the solutions and acids have run into one pool." To utter such sentiments, the author took considerable personal risk, but the book remains a relic of Brezhnev's times, right down to the inability of the author to use the word "Jew" in any shape or form, equivalent of Faulkner or Warren writing a novel without mentioning the words "black", "Negro" or "African". I sympathize with, maybe even admire Trifonov, but I can give his novel only three stars.