Russia's War Has Its Novel

Detailed summary

Doctor Zhivago,” the masterpiece of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak, follows its heroes through the vicissitudes of the Civil War and its aftermath in the early 20th century. And…

Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” chronicles Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812 — while his lesser-known but brilliant novella, “Hadji Murad,” skewers the imperial conquest of the Caucasus a few decades later.

“Doctor Zhivago,” the masterpiece of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak, follows its heroes through the vicissitudes of the Civil War and its aftermath in the early 20th century.

And “Life and Fate,” Vasily Grossman’s sprawling epic, covers the Soviet struggle against the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in Russia.

Granted, all of these books were published decades after the conflicts they described, but in the hyper-scrutinized years of President Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine, surely something should have appeared by now?

“Hurrah-patriots” in Moscow will point to the writer Zakhar Prilepin, a former Kremlin critic turned zealous war supporter who has fought on the side of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Yet Prilepin’s war novel, “Some Won’t Go to Hell” — which, in any case, dates from the phase of violence against Ukraine prior to the full-scale invasion in 2022 — shoulders no guilt, being chiefly a vehicle for self-puffery and evades true inquiry into the consequences of the conflict.

Where is the Russian literature that dissects the rot — the internal corrosion of waging the deadliest war in Europe since 1945? A contender has just arrived.

In mid-September, the émigré Russian writer Dmitry Glukhovsky released his latest novel, “Registratsiya” (“Registration”), for free on his Telegram channel, thus evading the censors. It tells the story of a young woman who tries to marry her boyfriend Sasha as he lies in his hospital bed in Moscow, gravely wounded from fighting in Ukraine. Her aim: to receive the generous payments due to the relatives of injured or dead soldiers.

“Registration” is being read with greedy interest among the large diaspora of anti-war Russians — as well as people within the country who access banned…

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Moscow Times. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.