Once More into the Breach

You get an extraordinary feeling from reading this book. On the one hand, the events its heroes experience are quite naturally perceived as belonging to the past, if not the very distant past—after all, we are separated from the events closest in time by some three decades. On the other hand, the further you read the more you sense how akin the novel's atmosphere of investigative zeal and the target of its polemics are to us today and how acutely we need them. How important it is for us to understand, together with the author, what engendered and formed its main character, Onisimov, as a social and psychological type and as a social phenomenon, what the essence of his "iron" nature was, and what ultimately broke him.