A Hero's Daughter

A Hero's Daughter

Andrei Makine

Language: English

Pages: 94

ISBN: B019TMEWW6

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In World War II Ivan Demidov won the Red Army's highest award for bravery, that of Hero of the Soviet Union. But the decades following the War have brought him a life of hardship, alleviated only by his pride in this achievement and the modest privileges granted to War veterans. His daughter, Olya, on the other hand, born in 1961 and trained as a linguist, takes up a post as an interpreter at Moscow's International Business Center with access to a metropolitan lifestyle beyond the dreams of her parents. The only catch is that her job involves servicing foreign businessmen around the clock and passing on information about them to the KGB. This is a stunning drama of disillusionment and tension between the two generations: the one that grew up under Stalin and saw its faith in him crumble and the one that grew up under Brezhnev, fixated on the glamour of the West and its material goods. Makine's vivid and authentic evocation of daily life in post-war Soviet Russia matches in its intensity the portraits of nineteenth-century Russian life offered by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

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it? But that's the poet speaking. And you and I are living in the world of political and ideological realities. Today your Frenchman is throwing the javelin or doing the high jump. Tomorrow he's being trained for some kind of inteligence work and comes back here as a spy. Wel, I'm not going to make a speech. You've already had an earful. I'm just going to say one thing to you. We, for our part, wil do everything possible to get you out of trouble. You understand, no one wants to cast a shadow

black clouds, as if in a state of weightlessness, beneath silent explosions. When these shots were shown Ivan could not hold back his tears. "I've become an old man," he thought, biting his lip. His chin trembled slightly. From time to time he made silent comments to the soldiers running across the screen: "Just look at that idiot running along without keeping his head down! Get down, get down for heaven's sake, imbecile… Pooh! And they cal that an attack! They're rushing straight into the enemy

the inevitable disappointment of an absurd hope. It was something she had already experienced when she was at the Institute and was now encountering again at the Center. She used to meet a new "subject" and, in spite of herself, without being conscious of it, would begin looking forward to some miraculous change, a completely new life that would be quite unlike the old one. But nothing would change. Sometimes she would go with her acquaintances to the airport. Sluggishly, as if in an underwater

the bandages and medicines filed the cupboards, the beds were lined up in the classrooms; it had been made ready in great haste. When he recovered consciousness after four days in a deep coma, what he made out through the whitish veil that shrouded his eyes in a viscous and painful fog was the portrait of Darwin. Below it he made out a map on which could be seen diffuse patches of three colors – red for the Soviet Union, green for the English colonies, and purple for those of France. Then the

that it would take only a word, or a little laugh, and his head would explode. He tried not to look at the bustling pedestrians. He had an impulse to stop and shout at them: "Shut up, won't you?" or to hit someone, so that for a moment, at least, the noise splitting his brain might cease. In his suit and raincoat he was horribly hot. He felt his shirt and pants sticking to his skin and his throat smarted from a dry tickle. But he walked on like an automaton, without taking off his raincoat, in

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