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Pyka
Russian
314 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
61 people want to read
About the author
Yuz Aleshkovsky
37 books14 followersThe author was born in Siberia in 1929; he spent several years in a labor camp before he was able to emigrate to the West in 1979.
Aleshkovsky writes in the tradition of Fyodor Dostoevski and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Aleshkovsky writes in the tradition of Fyodor Dostoevski and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 21, 2015
My condolences to the translator. You must really love your job. Sometimes Russian literature is just intolerable. Physical and psychological tortures of this book were '''nicely'' written.
February 21, 2020
Любопытный это жанр - "Исповедь палача". Прочитав достаточное количество такого рода книг, начинаешь видеть общие патерны: герой, всегда интеллектуал, откуда и растут его многочисленные дивиации и самые дикие гиммики, которые тем не менее работают, немного "Американского психопата", немного "1984", немного исторических селебрити и пара жутких историй, вдохновленных жизнью и почти обязательный хэппи энд, который всегда оборачивается моральным поражением. Вот и "Рука" идёт по такой же схеме. Главными достоинствами я бы назвал форму повествования в виде чистого монолога, который тут хорошо обыгрывается, и концепцию следователя НКВД, мстящего большевикам за убитых родителей. Но если сравнивать с эталонами жанра, скажем с вайнеровским "Евангелие от палача" книга Алешковского значительно слабее - и в стиле, и в масштабе, и в увлекательности.
February 26, 2024
Not as good as "Kangaroo"; better than most novels out there. "The Hand" should ring alarm bells for any modern reader.
"The Hand" is much more ambitious than "Kangaroo," although Aleshkovsky's topic remains the terrible crimes of Communism and the inherent evil in collectivist schemes. There are long flights of philosophy here, mostly having to do with a struggle between Soul and Reason. There are funny bits here, too, though this book is not as consistently comic as "Kangaroo."
Once more Yuz's narrator (in this case, an accomplished killer for the ruling Communists) takes a reader through some of the horrors of Soviet history, beginning with the murders and deliberate starving that went on in the 1930s during Stalin's collectivization drive in agriculture. "The Soviet regime ravaged and exterminated the wise and knowledgeable farmer. They oppressed the poor trash and the remnants of the true peasantry as no one in history has ever before oppressed his slaves."
The USSR was the devil's own experiment, Aleshkovsky maintains, but he notes the aims of the collectivist left are the same everywhere and always. The evils, in other words, are built into the systems. You just have to change some of the nouns.
"Young people of the new type, forged in the crucible of merciless hatred for the kulak, number-one enemy of the working class and the working-peasant intelligentsia. Young people whose five senses I strive with all my might to win over to the service of class awareness, the fundamental emotion inherited by us from Lenin and refined by you personally...."
Why people in the West remain blind to this catastrophe - indeed, try to emulate it and make it happen in their countries, too - is a maddening mystery to The Hand. "In the West, great friends of the Soviet Union lick the sweet snot from their lips, deeply moved by the historic reconstruction of social relations that Stalin is accomplishing...The mob of poets, writers, artists, composers and sculptors is already sinking its rat fangs into the golden vein of collectivization. No one, no one knows that long before Guernica, before Lidice, before Katyn, the scorched huts of Odinka and tens of hundreds of Odinkas stand black against the snow. The dead peasant farmers, the murdered people, have been dumped in a pile, and the starving wolves, freely and with impunity, are gobbling their corpses in the thief-dark night..."
But, of course, today we hear that "in order to save democracy, we must...." That is "the vicious nature of Bolshevism and of what the Bolshevik leaders, in defiance of the laws of logic, economics, and the evidence of their own eyes, call socialism...What was going on = the disintegration of the fabric of human relations built up over centuries, the forcible destruction of all bonds between men and their familial, material and cultural values."
In what way is any of that different from what the U.S. intelligentsia has been doing for decades now? And what might result? Aleshkovsky's Hand muses, "How would you advise a man to behave when he has been an eyewitness to monstrous atrocities committed against his nearest and dearest, committed with impunity, with relish, under the banner of a progressive idea?"
The problem is "The Idea" itself. "underneath the sheep's clothing, underneath the flittering of philanthropic Party slogans, underneath the sweet promises, underneath the invitation to the housewarming of the World Commune was the wolf-toothed grin of diabolical Forces! We understood how easily this false and perfidious Force, after calling upon the mob to institute new human relationships for the sake of the triumph of Communist morality, could introduce chaos into the common dwelling of humanity, how easily it could sweep away the household goods that the soul had gathered with difficulty, through dark ages and bright, to be increased in the future by children and grandchildren.
"With our puppy-dog eyes, not yet clogged by the rainbow puke of Soviet illusions, we saw how our well-to-do country had become hungry and ill clad...Despite the demonic orgy of agitation and propaganda that enmeshed soul and reason, we punks sensed what was hidden behind the slogans and fine words: a deathly abyss or a latrine full of shit. The words hid from us a monstrous tyranny, bloody carnage, the collapse of the five-year plans, the bankruptcy of the routine propaganda campaigns, the abuse of power, all-out thievery, moral degeneracy, the mockery of faith."
We should strive to be like The Hand's murdered ancestors and fight "The Devil's work, diabolism, Stalin was a shit, a cur, and a nothing, his comrades-in-arms were worms, pubic lice, appendixes stuffed with thumbtacks, murderers, shysters and churls. Grandfather was a conservative and a believer. He did not know how to measure the greatness of an era by the number of innocent victims offered on the altar of an idea. He could not reconcile himself to obvious vileness, to a moral collapse masquerading as enthusiasm."
All in all, recommended, and highly recommended *after* "Kangaroo."
"The Hand" is much more ambitious than "Kangaroo," although Aleshkovsky's topic remains the terrible crimes of Communism and the inherent evil in collectivist schemes. There are long flights of philosophy here, mostly having to do with a struggle between Soul and Reason. There are funny bits here, too, though this book is not as consistently comic as "Kangaroo."
Once more Yuz's narrator (in this case, an accomplished killer for the ruling Communists) takes a reader through some of the horrors of Soviet history, beginning with the murders and deliberate starving that went on in the 1930s during Stalin's collectivization drive in agriculture. "The Soviet regime ravaged and exterminated the wise and knowledgeable farmer. They oppressed the poor trash and the remnants of the true peasantry as no one in history has ever before oppressed his slaves."
The USSR was the devil's own experiment, Aleshkovsky maintains, but he notes the aims of the collectivist left are the same everywhere and always. The evils, in other words, are built into the systems. You just have to change some of the nouns.
"Young people of the new type, forged in the crucible of merciless hatred for the kulak, number-one enemy of the working class and the working-peasant intelligentsia. Young people whose five senses I strive with all my might to win over to the service of class awareness, the fundamental emotion inherited by us from Lenin and refined by you personally...."
Why people in the West remain blind to this catastrophe - indeed, try to emulate it and make it happen in their countries, too - is a maddening mystery to The Hand. "In the West, great friends of the Soviet Union lick the sweet snot from their lips, deeply moved by the historic reconstruction of social relations that Stalin is accomplishing...The mob of poets, writers, artists, composers and sculptors is already sinking its rat fangs into the golden vein of collectivization. No one, no one knows that long before Guernica, before Lidice, before Katyn, the scorched huts of Odinka and tens of hundreds of Odinkas stand black against the snow. The dead peasant farmers, the murdered people, have been dumped in a pile, and the starving wolves, freely and with impunity, are gobbling their corpses in the thief-dark night..."
But, of course, today we hear that "in order to save democracy, we must...." That is "the vicious nature of Bolshevism and of what the Bolshevik leaders, in defiance of the laws of logic, economics, and the evidence of their own eyes, call socialism...What was going on = the disintegration of the fabric of human relations built up over centuries, the forcible destruction of all bonds between men and their familial, material and cultural values."
In what way is any of that different from what the U.S. intelligentsia has been doing for decades now? And what might result? Aleshkovsky's Hand muses, "How would you advise a man to behave when he has been an eyewitness to monstrous atrocities committed against his nearest and dearest, committed with impunity, with relish, under the banner of a progressive idea?"
The problem is "The Idea" itself. "underneath the sheep's clothing, underneath the flittering of philanthropic Party slogans, underneath the sweet promises, underneath the invitation to the housewarming of the World Commune was the wolf-toothed grin of diabolical Forces! We understood how easily this false and perfidious Force, after calling upon the mob to institute new human relationships for the sake of the triumph of Communist morality, could introduce chaos into the common dwelling of humanity, how easily it could sweep away the household goods that the soul had gathered with difficulty, through dark ages and bright, to be increased in the future by children and grandchildren.
"With our puppy-dog eyes, not yet clogged by the rainbow puke of Soviet illusions, we saw how our well-to-do country had become hungry and ill clad...Despite the demonic orgy of agitation and propaganda that enmeshed soul and reason, we punks sensed what was hidden behind the slogans and fine words: a deathly abyss or a latrine full of shit. The words hid from us a monstrous tyranny, bloody carnage, the collapse of the five-year plans, the bankruptcy of the routine propaganda campaigns, the abuse of power, all-out thievery, moral degeneracy, the mockery of faith."
We should strive to be like The Hand's murdered ancestors and fight "The Devil's work, diabolism, Stalin was a shit, a cur, and a nothing, his comrades-in-arms were worms, pubic lice, appendixes stuffed with thumbtacks, murderers, shysters and churls. Grandfather was a conservative and a believer. He did not know how to measure the greatness of an era by the number of innocent victims offered on the altar of an idea. He could not reconcile himself to obvious vileness, to a moral collapse masquerading as enthusiasm."
All in all, recommended, and highly recommended *after* "Kangaroo."
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews