WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY ANDREY KURKOV A rich, successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog and attempts a scientific first by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. A distinctly worryingly human animal is now on the loose, and the professor's hitherto respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance. An absurd and superbly comic story, this classic novel can also be read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.
Unavailable for twenty years, this harrowing allegory of obedience to authority is esteemed as “one of the defining literary texts of the post-Stalin period.” (The Guardian) Set in a remote Siberian depot immediately following the demolition of one of the gulag’s notorious camps and the emancipation of its prisoners, Faithful Ruslan is an embittered cri de coeur from a writer whose circumstances obliged him to resist the violence of arbitrary power. “Every writer who writes anything in this country is made to feel he has committed a crime,” Georgi Vladimov said. Dissident, he said, is a word that “they force on you.” His mother, a victim of Stalin’s anti-Semitic policy, had been interred for two years in one of the camps from which Vladimov derived the wrenching detail of Faithful Ruslan. The novel circulated in samizdat for more than a decade, often attributed to Solzhenitsyn, before its publication in the West led to Vladimov’s harassment and exile. A starving stray, tortured and abandoned by the godlike “Master” whom he has unconditionally loved, Ruslan and his cadre of fellow guard dogs dutifully wait for the arrival of new prisoners—but the unexpected arrival of a work party provokes a climactic bloodletting. Fashioned from the perceptions of an uncomprehending animal, Vladimov’s insistently ironic indictment of the gulag spirals to encompass all of Man’s inexplicable cruelty.
Trochu v tieni jeho slávneho románu Majster a Margaréta ostáva fascinujúca románová freska Biela garda. Toto veľkolepé dielo písal Bulgakov v čase, keď ľudský život nemal veľkú cenu – v čase občianskej vojny v Rusku po boľševickej revolúcii. V období, keď to zdanlivo nové a dobré vznikalo v močiaroch presýtených krvou tisícov nevinných obetí. Spisovateľova umelecká pamäť hľadala obrazy a postavy, ktoré by sa stali opornými bodmi vo všadeprítomnom chaose a smrti. Našiel ich v trochu nostalgických spomienkach na otcovu zelenú lampu v pracovni a kachlicovú pec – symboloch rodinného kozuba Turbinovcov. No spisovateľ postupne opúšťa múry domu, jeho pohľad sa stáva panoramatickým, výpoveď drsnejšou, ale o to úprimnejšou. Vtedy ešte mladý prozaik majstrovsky zachytil revolučné vrenie na Ukrajine a podal jeho neobyčajne plastický a autentický obraz. Vznikla tak veľkolepá freska, ktorá je porovnateľná azda iba so slávnym románom Borisa Pasternaka Doktor Živago. Udalosti vníma očitý svedok, kronikár a analyzátor, ale najmä citlivý umelec, ktorý cíti zodpovednosť za každé svoje slovo i svoju myšlienku. 1. slovenské vydanie.
