I finished reading all 586 pages of Vassily Aksyonov’s Generations of Winter. You may (but probably don’t) remember that I read another of Askyonov’s novels last month, The Island of Crimea. Crimea is a very novel novel, set in the 1970s (written in the 80s) on the “island” (not the peninsula) of Crimea, which had pulled away from the U.S.S.R. after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and remained independent and strongly capitalist, the last outpost of the “White” army. As time went by, and as there was a modicum of liberality in the USSR after the death of Stalin, a number of intellectuals created the “One Path” (I think that was the name) movement to incorporate Crimea into the USSR but with its own, separate economic system (a la say, Hong Kong). Fighting with the old guard of Crimea, who wanted nothing to do with the U.S.S.R., they won their battle only to be deceived by the Communists, who had no intention of making Crimea anything other than one more Soviet republic. (Of course, mixed with this was the family drama and love life of the leader of One Path and the novel’s protagonist.)

Generations is a very different sort of novel, meant to be an epic family drama, sort of like, say, War and Peace, or the several generational novels of Thomas Mann. Written more than a decade after Crimea, it was to tell the story of the Russian revolution and life under Communism (by then a thing of the past). 

Did it succeed? I am not sure. Probably not, but it has to be noted that both books were written in Russian, and that I read what is probably the only English translations. Had I read it Russian (had I been able to read it in Russian, had I been Russian, etc.), I don’t know what I would have concluded. And, even if it failed in being the War and Peace of the 20th century, it succeeded in being a highly enjoyable novel, focusing on a very dark period of time.

The book follows the story of prominent Moscow surgeon, Boris Gradov, who lives with his wife and three children in a villa outside of Moscow, far from the general tumult of the city. Gradov, who is himself relatively apolitical, keeps his job and his home throughout the changes in Russian society because of his surgical skill, which is of such repute that he is even called in to tend to Stalin, when Stalin has a digestive problem that he thinks might end his life.

While the Gradovs are able to keep up their pre-war lives, the children face different circumstances. Their oldest son, clearly a talented and charming fellow, enters the U.S.S.R.’s army, and his on his way to a stellar career when he is arrested for (presumably false) accusations of anti-Soviet behavior and sentenced to the Gulag, where he lives for several years under horrific conditions before being released and restored not only to his former rank, but to an exalted army rank during the depths of World War II. His beautiful wife, who was also arrested (because she was his wife) and sent to a different prison camp, is also released, although they found that the spark was gone. They both found substitutes, but neither substitute was appropriate in Soviet society (her new man was an American, his a prison camp nurse).

The middle Gradov son was a by the book Marxist, who was drafted into the army and, for a long time, feared lost. His wife, a Jewish woman who became more and more disturbed as time went on, and their adopted son – who was drafted never to return – also figure in the saga.

The youngest Gradov, their daughter Nina, was a free spirit, an intellectual, a poet, with the knack of survival, who hobnobbed with the most prominent intellectuals of 20th century Russia, married a young doctor, who was her father’s protege, but who didn’t survive World War II. She found a substitute, as well, an old friend she ran into at an intellectual gathering.

There were others, particularly relatives of Boris Gradov’s wife, who – like Stalin – was Georgian by birth, and who had some prominent family members with Trotskyite tendencies, and one family member who became a close underling of NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria.

So, you see, this is quite a complex story. And it flows right along. I could almost remember who was who most of the time. But it did lack something that great sagas do have. Aksyonov is a spare writer. He tells you what is going on, but it is all pretty matter of fact. That’s fine, probably very good, for the story, but it leaves out the scenery. What did the Gradov villa, where so much time was spent, look like. How cold was it during the winters of the war? What was the atmosphere in all of these places on the western front, where Marshall Gradov was leading his troops? The full picture just isn’t there. 

Of course, I shouldn’t complain (and, really, I am not), but otherwise this book would have been 986 pages, not 586. And then I probably never would have picked it up. And picking it up was a good idea. Reading it was far from a waste of time. This is a good book.