TWO WINTERS AND THREE SUMMERS

by Fyodor Abramov ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 18, 1984

Abramov, who died in 1983, was one of the chief practitioners of Soviet ""village prose"" (Vastly Shukshin and Valentin Rasputin are two others who've been translated into English); his work is set in the far northern--but un-Siberian--province of Arkhangelsk, with its forests and mosquitoes, its wheat fields and rivers and white nights. And this novel, the middle volume of a trilogy, concerns the Pryaslin family, members of a weak kolkhoz (collective) during the last years of WW II and shortly thereafter. The father of the clan was killed in battle early in the war, so the Pryaslins are headed up by teenaged Mikhail--a vividly strong boy who eventually becomes foreman, then chairman, of the village and its workers. Mikhail's heavy responsibility: constantly running interference for the hungry people--who desperately need to hold over a little grain for themselves, some meat, a privately owned cow. Thus, Abramov offers here a picture of the corrupt and innate failure built into the collectivization apparatus--a picture which is spread out with great narrative fluency, always keyed to the personal: the aged Old Believer hounded from his home despite losing numerous sons in the war; Mikhail's brash friend Egorsha, who is ideologically opportunistic; Vavara, a widow with whom Mikhail has a passionate, brief affair; even the Pryaslins' heroic cow Zvezdonya, which keeps the children alive on its milk (supplementing war-time loaves of bread made from moss and sawdust). And though the novel's realism is uplifting in its familial affection (which probably explains why it won the USSR's 1975 State Prize for literature), there's both freshness and pity in the sweep of Abramov's miniature epic: intimate lives barely staying afloat together--on a sea of famine and harshness.

Pub Date: May 18, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1984

Categories: FICTION