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- ISBN: 9781935554677 | 1935554670
- Cover: Paperback
- Copyright: 9/27/2011
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 Ruslanis an embittered cri de coeurfrom 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 samizdatfor 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. From the Trade Paperback edition.