Dust and ashes

About this book

In his long-awaited novel Dust and Ashes, Anatoli Rybakov boldly brings to life the seminal event of the modern era - World War II - from the Russian perspective. As Stalin and Hitler clash, Red Army tanks advance, and the struggle that changed the course of the twentieth century plays out on the battlefields, Rybakov brings his epic story of the Soviet experience to its spectacular conclusion. Heralded by critics as a twentieth-century Tolstoy, Anatoli Rybakov won international acclaim in 1988 as the first Soviet novelist to describe - with shocking candor and poignancy - life under Stalin's brutal dictatorship. Suppressed by the Soviet Union for over twenty years, his Children of the Arbat presented a masterful psychological portrait of Stalin and his impact on a circle of young friends living in Moscow's intellectual and artistic center, the Arbat. Rybakov continued his story of "the children of the revolution" in Fear, which recounted a once-hopeful generation's descent into terror during the era of Stalin's purges. Dust and Ashes, the trilogy's final volume, is the epic's most dramatic. Spanning the years 1937 to 1943, Rybakov picks up the narrative as Stalin's egomania undermines the Red Army - just when the Russian people face the Nazi onslaught. Rybakov returns to the Arbat circle and follows his central figure; Sasha Pankratov, who emerges from despairing exile to join the army's tank corps. Thrust into the most savage and crucial fighting, Sasha is both participant and witness to cruelty and bravery amid senseless slaughter. And - at the height of the battle - he reunites with his lost love, Varya.