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Train to Samarkand, a novel by Guzel Yakhina (2021)
Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Azerbaijan - QANUN, Bosnia - BUYBOOK, Croatia - HENA, Czech Republic - PROSTOR, France - NOIR SUR BLANC, Germany - AUFBAU, Hungary - HELIKON, Italy - E/O, Kazakhstan - FOLIANT, Lithuania - ALMA LITTERA, Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Netherlands - QUERIDO, Poland - NOIR SUR BLANC, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - LAGUNA, Slovakia - SLOVART, Spain - ACANTILADO, Turkey - ALFA, Uzbekistan - BEST-BOOK, World Arabic - AL MADA, World English - EUROPA EDITIONS UK/USA
Winner of the Reader’s Choice Award of 2022 Big Book Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2022 Big Book Literary Award
Longlisted for the 2023 Prix Médicis Étranger (France)
Shortlisted for the 2024 Prix Montluc Résistance et Liberté (France)
During the last years of the Russian Civil war (1917-1922), the bony hand of famine strangled a heartland of Russia. The territory devastated most completely stretched along the Volga basin all the way from the Tatar Republic down to the river’s mouth, and it extended far north, east, and west. The long period of war had removed hundreds of thousands of peasants from the soil; also, the Bolsheviks’ policy of grain requisitioning (not to mention similar measures taken by their opponents), diminished food reserves. A severe drought blighted the crops of the Volga basin by the summer of 1921, inaugurating a catastrophe destined to claim at least five million lives. For nearly two years, chilling accounts surfaced from the famine region, describing a population driven to ever more wretched extremes by hunger. A variety of emergency measures, none more dramatic than mass evacuations of juveniles by railway transportation from afflicted provinces, were undertaken by the Bolsheviks. Altogether, the government evacuated approximately 150,000 children, a majority of them appear to have been orphans or otherwise homeless.
Action of Guzel Yakhina's novel Train To Samarkand takes place on one of these trains evacuating 500 hungry children from an orphanage in Kazan to a southern city of Samarkand in October, 1923. Rail convoy's commander Deyev, a young Civil war veteran with a compassionate and tender character, is accompanied and supervised by a children commission representative Belaya, a strong-willed Bolshevik woman. They are two opposite extremes united by a shared purpose of saving children's lives at all costs. Their journey lasts six weeks and four thousand miles.
Yakhina's Train To Samarkand is an adventure novel set on a backdrop of the most troublesome historical period in Russian history, a modern robinzonade, a travel story of epic drama caliber. A series of scary adventures along the way of Deyev's train—getting food or medical supplies for his young charges, finding a nurse for a newborn baby, wandering in the desert, clashing with gangs—are written as if they were a mythical events, but with extreme realism and vividness. Deyev, like his legendary predecessors—Odysseus, Hercules, Jason— on his way opposes to the absolute Evil, Death, coming to him in various guises—as Hunger, Disease, or Murder. At the same time, a constant suspense of their journey, a feeling of danger, and expectation of a tragedy, is masterfully seasoned by the author with unexpectedly touching and somewhat comic situations and mise-en-scenes.
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Didar and Faruk, a novel by Sana Valiulina
Rights sold: Germany - KNAUS, Netherlands - Meulenhoff
An epic love story in the narrative tradition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but this time with Stalinist Russia as the vivid backdrop: Didar en Faroek, by the Tatar Sana Valiulina, who lives in the Netherlands and writes in Dutch, is a book of international allure. Never before has this period been so convincingly and majestically articulated in a novel.
Read more...Didar and Faruk are distant cousins from a Tatar family that was dispersed in the displacement of ethnic groups in Russia in the 1920s. Didar grows up in the town of Pushkin, near St Petersburg, and Faruk in the centre of Moscow, which, at the time, was inhabited by multi-racial peoples from southern Russia. As in a fairy tale, Didar and Faruk are made for one another, and although the course of history keeps them apart for years, they succeed in keeping their love alive in their correspondence.
Didar rejects her Muslim background by becoming a model pioneer in the thirties and she is even invited to the model child camp Artek, where she receives the first glimpse of freedom in her interaction with the sons of party functionaries who enjoy themselves outside the camp.
In contrast, religious faith is alive and kicking in Faruk’s family, although it is undercover. Faruk is an impressive twentieth-century anti-hero: in much the same way as little Oskar in Grass’s Die Blechtrommel did not wish to grow, Faruk does not speak until he is eleven, as a consequence of Stalin’s gaze in the picture on the wall above his cot. Moreover, like several other unforgettable figures in Russian literature, he suffers from epilepsy, and Valiulina describes his epileptic attacks brilliantly, like a constrictor coming upon him.
History sweeps across Russia. After the terror of the thirties comes the devastating Second World War, and then the horrors of the Gulag. Didar and Faruk live in a moral vacuum: while Stalin attempts to create an artificial humanity, Didar loses all faith in a communist Utopia and falls in love with a German officer, thereby surviving the war. Faruk fights for Russia against the Germans, is taken prisoner, fetches up in Normandy, and is forced to resist the Allied invasion. After the war, he is taken to a camp in England from where he is deported to Allied Russia. There, he awaits the Gulag, the bitter fate of 2 million other Russian war prisoners. The Islamic faith is their only moral prop, and their love for one another their only motivation, until they see one another once more…
In this overwhelming, empathic, anti-Soviet novel of the 1922-56 period, Valiulina portrays two people who survive the Stalinist terror, each in their own way, without losing their human dignity. It is a terrifying story in which she has processed the experiences of her parents. It is her proof of proficiency, and simultaneously a glorious settlement of her past and that of her family. -- NRC Handelsblad
A monumental book. -- de Volkskrant