Road to Calvary - Book Two: The Eighteenth Year: A New Translation

The year is 1918. The Petersburg that The Sisters rendered so precisely - the white nights, the literary cafés, the drawing rooms of the intelligentsia, the specific world of the Silver Age in its last summer - is gone. The October Revolution has occurred, Brest-Litovsk has ceded Ukraine to Germany, and the Civil War is at its most savage and its most fluid: the question of who will govern Russia genuinely open, the front lines shifting across the vast geography of a country at war with itself, the moral landscape organized by a violence too multiple and too overlapping to be contained by the available political categories.

Katya and Dasha are dispersed - separated by the geography of catastrophe, the specific intimacy of sisterhood tested against the distances that the revolution has enforced. Telegin has aligned with the Red Army, the practical man's assessment of which side represents the possibility of building something in the ruins. Roshchin has moved toward the White forces, drawn by the military tradition that has organized his entire formation and that the revolution has placed on the wrong side of history. Two men who love two sisters, on opposite sides of the most fundamental conflict of the moment, moving through a landscape whose violence neither their personal loyalties nor their political positions have prepared them for.

Alexei Tolstoy published The Eighteenth Year in 1927-1928, after his return to the Soviet Union - writing now from within the literary culture he had committed himself to, under the developing pressures that Socialist Realism would formalize, with the specific constraints and the specific freedoms of a major writer navigating the requirements of the state he had chosen. The difference from Book One is audible in the novel's moral architecture: the historical forces are beginning to resolve toward their destination, the characters' trajectories acquiring the shape that the ordeal's passage requires. But the specific texture of 1918 - its violence, its displacement, its genuine darkness - was too fully known from personal experience to be entirely organized into retrospective clarity, and what survives the constraints is the honest rendering of what it cost individual human beings to walk through the torments and keep walking.

The dispersal that the Civil War has enforced is itself the argument: the intimate social world of Book One has been exploded into fragments, and across the vast contested geography of Ukraine and the Don and the Volga, the characters are learning what survives when everything that organized their lives no longer exists.

The second movement of one of the great Russian novels of the twentieth century - the world after the Silver Age, the ordeal at its most violent, the question of what the passage leads to still entirely open.