Faithful Ruslan (Neversink)
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 1935554670
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Unavailable for twenty years, this harrowing allegory of obedience to authority is esteemed as “one of the defining literary texts of the post-Stalin period.” (The Guardian)
Set in a remote Siberian depot immediately following the demolition of one of the gulag’s notorious camps and the emancipation of its prisoners, Faithful Ruslan is an embittered cri de coeur from a writer whose circumstances obliged him to resist the violence of arbitrary power. “Every writer who writes anything in this country is made to feel he has committed a crime,” Georgi Vladimov said. Dissident, he said, is a word that “they force on you.” His mother, a victim of Stalin’s anti-Semitic policy, had been interred for two years in one of the camps from which Vladimov derived the wrenching detail of Faithful Ruslan. The novel circulated in samizdat for more than a decade, often attributed to Solzhenitsyn, before its publication in the West led to Vladimov’s harassment and exile.
A starving stray, tortured and abandoned by the godlike “Master” whom he has unconditionally loved, Ruslan and his cadre of fellow guard dogs dutifully wait for the arrival of new prisoners—but the unexpected arrival of a work party provokes a climactic bloodletting. Fashioned from the perceptions of an uncomprehending animal, Vladimov’s insistently ironic indictment of the gulag spirals to encompass all of Man’s inexplicable cruelty.
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smells stopped and the only clue was Master’s footsteps, firmly imprinted in the snow. Now Ruslan could not go wrong. Master’s legs were slightly bandy and perhaps a little short for his height, but he trod hard, putting down the whole of his boot sole at once, as though carrying a heavy weight. Today he was wearing his very best pair of leather boots—which were admittedly the same that all masters wore—but then his feet inside them were wrapped in footcloths and they (as we have already
lodger—a bowlful of hot soup with bones in it. There followed several agonizing minutes in which Ruslan almost fainted with temptation and which consequently rather spoiled this little ceremony of induction. The bowl had to be removed untouched, at which the Shabby Man was triumphant and Stiura was offended, promising that she would send him to the knacker’s yard the very next day: “And there,” she said, “they’ll make a lo-ot of soap out of you! You’ll see.” Sustained by only the shakiest of
Chief Master, who had led the way, turning around every now and again to rub his red face with his mitten, stopped them all outside the door. Advancing stealthily, he opened the door without letting it creak, and bent forward to listen, raising one earflap of his fur cap. The entranceway of the hut gave forth a gust of heat and the usual smell, together with a buzzing noise—the same sort of vaguely indignant buzz that arose in the dogs’ quarters when the food came late. Behind the thin inner
as long as he was there no harm could come to them—be it from a snake, a charging cow or a rabid dog. … One blue, frosty morning in the Siberian taiga, he was floundering through a snowdrift to help his master, who was in trouble; sinking his teeth into the bear’s rump, Ruslan held on with a deathly grip, and when he in turn was in mortal danger his master saved him by dispatching the brute with knife and rifle butt. After he had received his reward of the first slice of meat, dripping with warm
who has witnessed the slaughter of one of the sheep he has been so carefully guarding. He no doubt finds the sight depressing, but he does not love his master any the less for it. After all, the sheep never object—they hold out their heads with such enlightened resignation, such gentle weariness, such sublime sadness in their eyes as they offer their throats to the knife.… Did all the other dogs share Ruslan’s feelings in this? He did not know. When the whole pack of dogs is zealously serving