Fear - Softcover

Anatoli Rybakov

4.46

809 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099301822 ISBN 13: 9780099301820

Publisher: Arrow Books Ltd, 1994

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Second book in the 'Childre of Arbat' trilogy. Fear is the passionate and powerful story of Sasha Pankratov, a Russian student unjustly arrested in 1934. No longer an idealistic youth, it vividly evokes his exile in Siberia and his eventual return to the madness of the Great Purge, the Stalinist nightmare) (The stunning, long-awaited sequel of Children of the Arbat, 'the most important work of fiction by a Soviet author since Doctor Zhivago' (Time)

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Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian

From Kirkus Reviews:

The years of the Yezhov terror, the Great Purge of the Thirties that began with the Zinoviev/Kamenev show trials, occupy the second volume of Rybakov's Arbat Trilogy (Children of the Arbat, 1988)--and the heavy hand of the book seems in keeping with the tenor of its story: a time in Stalin's Russia when betrayal was so disseminated that it became almost unconscious; when by merely breathing, or so it seemed, you could destroy yourself or someone else. Presiding over this mass terror is the chief paranoic himself, Stalin, whose thought processes Rybakov tries to follow (really successfully in only one section--where Stalin has an aide destroyed for the crime of watching Stalin clumsily handle a book: a crime that spirals exponentially in the mad leader's mind). As a novelist, Rybakov is pedestrian, and least convincing are the ongoing small-fish characters of the trilogy--Sasha the student, just released from Siberia when this story begins, trying to make his way back to Moscow; Sharok, the eager up-and-coming NKVD-er; Varya, Sasha's lover. History streams around these characters, but a reader's not quickened by them. Most lively here is the sense of Rybakov's effortfulness in telling post-Soviet readers their own baleful history. But the book has a drumming artlessness--think of Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris--that is meant to tell the facts, and then immediately tell them again, and again. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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