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Train to Samarkand, a novel by Guzel Yakhina (2021)
Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Azerbaijan - QANUN, Bosnia - BUYBOOK, Croatia - HENA, Czech Republic - PROSTOR, France - NOIR SUR BLANC, Germany - AUFBAU, Hungary - HELIKON, Italy - SALANI, Kazakhstan - FOLIANT, Lithuania - ALMA LITTERA, Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Netherlands - QUERIDO, Poland - NOIR SUR BLANC, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - LAGUNA, Slovakia - SLOVART, Spain - ACANTILADO, Turkey - ALFA, Uzbekistan - BEST-BOOK, World Arabic - AL MADA
Winner of the Reader’s Choice Award of 2022 Big Book Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2022 Big Book Literary Award
Longlisted for the 2023 Prix Médicis Étranger (France)
Shortlisted for the 2024 Prix Montluc Résistance et Liberté (France)
During the last years of the Russian Civil war (1917-1922), the bony hand of famine strangled a heartland of Russia. The territory devastated most completely stretched along the Volga basin all the way from the Tatar Republic down to the river’s mouth, and it extended far north, east, and west. The long period of war had removed hundreds of thousands of peasants from the soil; also, the Bolsheviks’ policy of grain requisitioning (not to mention similar measures taken by their opponents), diminished food reserves. A severe drought blighted the crops of the Volga basin by the summer of 1921, inaugurating a catastrophe destined to claim at least five million lives. For nearly two years, chilling accounts surfaced from the famine region, describing a population driven to ever more wretched extremes by hunger. A variety of emergency measures, none more dramatic than mass evacuations of juveniles by railway transportation from afflicted provinces, were undertaken by the Bolsheviks. Altogether, the government evacuated approximately 150,000 children, a majority of them appear to have been orphans or otherwise homeless.
Action of Guzel Yakhina's novel Train To Samarkand takes place on one of these trains evacuating 500 hungry children from an orphanage in Kazan to a southern city of Samarkand in October, 1923. Rail convoy's commander Deyev, a young Civil war veteran with a compassionate and tender character, is accompanied and supervised by a children commission representative Belaya, a strong-willed Bolshevik woman. They are two opposite extremes united by a shared purpose of saving children's lives at all costs. Their journey lasts six weeks and four thousand miles.
Yakhina's Train To Samarkand is an adventure novel set on a backdrop of the most troublesome historical period in Russian history, a modern robinzonade, a travel story of epic drama caliber. A series of scary adventures along the way of Deyev's train—getting food or medical supplies for his young charges, finding a nurse for a newborn baby, wandering in the desert, clashing with gangs—are written as if they were a mythical events, but with extreme realism and vividness. Deyev, like his legendary predecessors—Odysseus, Hercules, Jason— on his way opposes to the absolute Evil, Death, coming to him in various guises—as Hunger, Disease, or Murder. At the same time, a constant suspense of their journey, a feeling of danger, and expectation of a tragedy, is masterfully seasoned by the author with unexpectedly touching and somewhat comic situations and mise-en-scenes.
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Leningrad, a novel by Igor Vishnevetsky (2010)
Rights sold: World English - Dalkey Archive Press, Italy - Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina (Incroci di Civiltà), Macedonia - BATA PRESS MILLENNIUM, Russia - VREMYA
2011 NOS literary award
2010 "Novyi mir" literary magazine award for the best fiction
Vishnevetsky’s Leningrad is a masterful mixture of prosaic and poetical texts, excerpts from private letters and diaries, quotes from newspapers and NKVD internal documents, in which the author fuses rough documentary with philosophical grotesque and depicts the Siege as a moment of truth for Leningrad artists and white-collars. The story is told through the correspondence and diary entries of the protagonists, the Composer, his lover Vera and Vera’s husband, the naval officer intercepting enemy communications for the Russia’s Baltic Fleet positioned in and in front of Leningrad. The love triangle ends tragically when Vera, pregnant from her lover, decides to leave the besieged city but meets a macabre death, while the Composer at the same time mentally collapses and possibly dies of hunger, unaware of his lover’s fate.
The most inhuman conditions of the Siege, starvation and continuous bombing and shelling make the background to the story. For the first time in modern Russian literature Vishnevetsky brings up the issue of vitality of moral and ethical values cultivated and magnified by Russian intelligentsia, and their ability to confront the cruel reality. In their wild attempts to survive the protagonists hold on to their art, ideas, and sentiments over which neither Bolsheviks, nor Nazis, not even the death itself have power.
Vishnevetsky’s narrative departs into highly experimental and emotionally charged discussion of “ultimate questions” of one’s existence. In this regard his Leningrad closes the gap between present-day Russian letters and the tradition of Russian philosophical novel which existed uninterrupted until the 1940’s.
Russia's stunningly beautiful second city, formerly and now St Petersburg, but known as Leningrad between 1924 and 1991, has had a unique character since Peter the Great built it as his window on the West at the start of the 18th century. As Petrograd (1914-24) it witnessed the Russian Revolutions of 1917. The Siege of Leningrad during WWII is one of the most moving, stirring, and horrific tales of human ingenuity and endurance in history.
The destruction of Leningrad was one of Adolf Hitler's strategic objectives in attacking the Soviet Union. Hitler's plan was to subdue Leningrad through blockade, bombardment, and starvation prior to seizing the city. The Siege of Leningrad was a prolonged military operation. It started on September 8, 1941, when the last land connection to the city was severed. Although the Red Army managed to open a narrow land corridor to the city in 1943, the final lifting of the siege took place only in 1944, 872 days after it began.
The two-and-a-half year siege caused the greatest destruction and the largest loss of life ever known in a modern city. The 872 days of the siege resulted in unparalleled famine in the Leningrad region through disruption of utilities, water, energy and food supplies. This resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 civilians and soldiers and the evacuation of 1,400,000 more inhabitants of the city, mainly women and children, many of whom died during evacuation due to starvation and bombardment.
Human losses in Leningrad on both sides exceeded those of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Moscow, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The siege of Leningrad remains the most lethal siege in world history.
Civilians in the city suffered from extreme starvation, especially in winter of 1941–1942. Between November 1941 and February 1942 the only food available to the citizen was 125 grams of bread, of which 50–60% consisted of sawdust and other inedible admixtures, and distributed with ration cards. In conditions of extreme temperatures (down to -30°C) and city transport being out of service, the distance of a few kilometers to work or the food distributing kiosks were insurmountable obstacles for many citizens. People often died on the streets, and citizens shortly became accustomed to the look of death. Reports of cannibalism appeared in the winter of 1941–1942, after all birds and pets were eaten by survivors.
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