A Novelist and his Hero
A Novelist and his Hero

Summary/Abstract: In 1994 a short documentary-historical novella, entitled “A General and His Army,” was published in two successive issues of the Russian literary magazine, Znamia. Its author, Georgii Nikolaevich Vladimov, had worked for “Novyi Mir” and “Literaturnaia Gazeta” from the 1950s onwards, first as a literary critic and later as a prose writer, but for his human rights activities was obliged in 1983 to emigrate to West Germany, where he has lived ever since. He described the novella as the “journal variant,” implying the existence of a longer version (which was in fact published in 1997, and will be discussed later). The novella won the 1995 Russian Booker Prize, and also aroused a considerable storm. Those who attacked it did so almost wholly on non-literary grounds, while those who praised it concentrated on its perceived literary qualities, but, like its attackers, also represented a particular ideological approach to it, rather than one based solely or primarily on literary criteria.

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