The Children of the Arbat: History and Contemporaneity

Abstract

For us, it was as though The Children of the Arbat [Deti Arbata] was the last in a series of works—Bek's New Appointment [Novoe naznachenie], Trifonov's Disappearance [Ischeznovenie], and Antonov's Vas'ka—that all came out at almost the same time. These works revealed a new zone of truthfulness to us about the thirties and the people of those years, not to mention about ourselves, those alive today, in the sense that we all came out of that era—with its aura of grandeur and drama and the spiritual residue it left in our souls and in our memory. Certain of the details, characters, and motivations in these four books look the same, but such accidental coincidences only testify to the reliability of the details and the authors' perceptiveness in understanding the vital processes taking place at that time.