Viktor Vavitch, Paperback Book, By: Boris Jitkov

Angry students attracted by terrorism, workers seduced by Marxism and the revolutionary struggle, protesting liberals, simply dreaming of reforming Russia, authorities on the defensive, it is in this atmosphere of muffled effervescence that the novel-fresco opens. by Boris Jitkov, considered by Pasternak as "the best on the revolution of 1905". Against this background of restlessness imprinted with hope, the author sows his characters whose fates, full of promise, will abort for the most part, like this failed revolution. Like the works of a Gogol or a Zamiatine, Viktor Vavitch, undoubtedly one of the last great Russian novels, is served by a writing which places language and poetry above all. Written between 1929 and 1934, printed in 1941, the work is judged "inappropriate" and "useless" by the Stalinist censorship, which orders that it be sent to the pestle. But the printer keeps a few copies: it is therefore a text miraculously saved from oblivion that the reader is invited to discover.