IV Compagnia Strojbat

by Sergei Kaledin

Siberia Orientale, marzo 1970. In una città non meglio precisata dalle parti del Bajkal sono acquartierati alcuni reggimenti dell'Armata Rossa, e tra questi la IV Compagnia "Strojbat", un battaglione logistico del Genio che raccoglie la peggior feccia dell'esercito. Operai, contadini, impiegati, canaglie ed ubriaconi, drogati e delinquenti, uomini talvolta menomati nel fisico, spesso di bassissimo livello intellettuale, appartenenti a diverse etnie e nazionalità - zigani, ebrei, russi, moldavi, turkmeni - parlano tutti uno stesso inguaggio impregnato di oscenità, violenza, frustrazioni, paura. E tutti indistintamente rispondono ad uno stesso codice di comportamenti che vede i deboli sfruttati senza pietà, e i cinici, i corrotti, trionfare con le armi del sadismo e della delazione.

Genres: Russia, Fiction

111 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

SERGEI KALEDIN was born in Moscow in 1949. He spent his years of compulsory military service in one of the infamous construction battalions - to all intents and purposes a forced labour corps - building roads and felling trees in Siberia, and subsequently worked as a designer, a night watchman and a gravedigger. He began writing while studying at the Gorky Literary Institute, from which he graduated in 1979. For ten years his stories were regularly praised by Moscow's main literary journals and as consistently rejected. However, in 1987, as a result of glasnost, The Corridor, a collection of five stories, was published in Moscow. Only later - and not without a struggle - did two stories, "The Humble Cemetery" (now a successful stage play and film) and the more recent "The Construction Battalion", appear in the prestigious journal Novyi Mir. Almost over night Kaledin became one of the best-known younger writers in the Soviet Union, and his stories are now being translated into all the major European languages.

Reviews

[Sipovic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Смиренное кладбище light.