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Disappearance
First published posthumously in 1987 during the post-glasnost rise of literary freedom, Disappearance is a work of earlier times. Originally begun in the 1950s, this novel of childhood moves back and forth between 1937 and 1942, two troubled years in Soviet history when the disappearances of family and friends during the Stalinist purges and the Second World War become regular occurrences in the life of a young man.
181 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
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About the author
Yury Trifonov
47 books24 followersYury Valentinovich Trifonov was a Soviet writer. He was a leading figure of the Soviet "Urban Prose".
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 27, 2025
This is a difficult book to rate as it was unfinished at Trifonov’s death and that is pretty obvious - mainly because it cuts off mid sentence with absolutely no resolution... However, as another reviewer points out, given that this is a book about the purges and the sudden and (seemingly) indiscriminate disappearances of people, this may not be entirely inappropriate. We can also be pretty confident of what would have befallen the main characters as the alternate chapters focusing on the son makes it pretty clear that something malevolent has happened to his father and also because, with its origins as semi-autobiographical, we know that the author’s father and uncle both died during the great purges. More disorienting is the fact that some of the characters feel a bit mixed up and it can be difficult to pinpoint what relationship is what. Most of these resolve themselves but I am guessing that with proper editing things would have flowed more easily. Despite all of this, it’s still very much a worthwhile read. Trifonov writes beautifully (‘It was a Pushkin winter’) and it is really something different to read about the period mainly through the eyes of a child - who can’t quite understand what is happening and still sees most things from his idealistic (and in this case privileged) Soviet experience.
I read House on the Embankment a few years (ahem decades) ago. I remember being struck by it then and really want to dig it out again to compare what a fully formed novel of the author’s looks like. I’m also guessing that this would be a better starting point for anyone interested in the period, but as long as you go in to this with the right expectation this is still a perfectly good read - although it’s sad to think what it could have been if finished properly.
I read House on the Embankment a few years (ahem decades) ago. I remember being struck by it then and really want to dig it out again to compare what a fully formed novel of the author’s looks like. I’m also guessing that this would be a better starting point for anyone interested in the period, but as long as you go in to this with the right expectation this is still a perfectly good read - although it’s sad to think what it could have been if finished properly.
March 16, 2012
Trifunov's novel, which was begun in the 1950s and only published in 1987, was unfinished when he passed away in 1981. This may account for some of the difficulty I had in following the narrative at times - whether this was a characteristic of his writing or something that would have been remedied with further editing, I don't know. That said, the incompleteness of the novel, both in terms of the narrative and in its editing/polishing, works to great effect - in a book about the Stalinist purges, the writer just... disappears. It really is quite haunting - the maintenance and intensification of tension coupled with the absence of resolution creates a mood that seems reminiscent of what Moscow would be like then, even if it's unintentional.
The narrative bounces back and forth between 1937 and 1942 and serves to illustrate just how pervasively and oppressively the fear of Stalin permeated everyday life. We only directly witness the agents of the NKVD, but never are we privy to anyone actually being arrested. The disappearances just happen, and are woven into the fabric of living in that time. The 1937 vignettes come mostly from the perspective of childhood, where playful schoolyard taunts and boyish adventures are marred by fellow students being "purged" from the contrived secret societies of their classmates. The 1942 narrative follows the same family, with the schoolboy now a factory worker, and demonstrates how families coped with disappearances and exile, even as the oppression continued with the war.
I think the temptation in examining totalitarianism is to focus on the dramatic events, the actual disappearances or purges. But in foregrounding everyday life - the fact that even in one of the most oppressive historic environments imaginable, life, with its joys and sadness, went on like normal - the pervasive oppression is thrown into a much higher relief.
At any rate, read this - it's short, it's engaging, and it's important.
The narrative bounces back and forth between 1937 and 1942 and serves to illustrate just how pervasively and oppressively the fear of Stalin permeated everyday life. We only directly witness the agents of the NKVD, but never are we privy to anyone actually being arrested. The disappearances just happen, and are woven into the fabric of living in that time. The 1937 vignettes come mostly from the perspective of childhood, where playful schoolyard taunts and boyish adventures are marred by fellow students being "purged" from the contrived secret societies of their classmates. The 1942 narrative follows the same family, with the schoolboy now a factory worker, and demonstrates how families coped with disappearances and exile, even as the oppression continued with the war.
I think the temptation in examining totalitarianism is to focus on the dramatic events, the actual disappearances or purges. But in foregrounding everyday life - the fact that even in one of the most oppressive historic environments imaginable, life, with its joys and sadness, went on like normal - the pervasive oppression is thrown into a much higher relief.
At any rate, read this - it's short, it's engaging, and it's important.
March 11, 2023
Velmi narocne citanie. Miestami som sa sam stracal, kniha myslim nie je ani dokoncena, z dovodu komunizmu bola vydana az po autorovej smrti. Opisuje pribeh chlapca v dobach najvacsich stalnistickych cistiek. Obzvlast ma dostala situacia, kde rodina sa rozpravala pri stole, o zmiznuti jednho ich znameho a ze co sa mu asi stalo, zatial co chlapec pocuval za dverami. Neviem si to ani zivo predstavit, ake to muselo byt hrozostrasne zit v rokoch 30 rokoch minuleho storocia v Rusku.
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May 18, 2025Youthful recollections of the wartime purges which took the author's father and uncle, Soviet stalwarts erased by Stalin's madness. Published posthumously and left unfinished, which was too bad for everyone—this has the makings of something profound and epic, another Life and Fate or The Burning Years.
August 29, 2011
Yury Trifonov wrote the autobiographical novel Disappearance on and off for a period of twenty years. The novel, about a boy growing up during the turbulent years of 1937 and 1942, was not published until six years after Trifonov’s death in 1987.
Contrary to the stereotype of the Soviet-era writer as epitomized by the figures of Nabokov, Pasternak, or Solzhenitsyn, Trifonov curiously did not fit the usual image of the émigré or underground writer. Among his contemporary writers, Trifonov had more or less fewer troubles with the authorities. One reason offered to account for this in Ellendea Proffer’s brief introduction to Disappearance is the fact that Trifonov’s style of writing “tended to mislead both critics and readers alike into thinking they were dealing with a writer who was perhaps unusual, but nonetheless orthodox at his core.”
While Disappearance could not have been published in Trifonov’s lifetime due to the provocative nature of the book’s theme, in a way, the same could be said of the style used in framing of the novel. There is a subtlety in Trifonov’s writing which seems to make harmless in Disappearance what could be deemed as offensive in other texts. This very same logic worked in Disappearance because of the device of having the narrative unfold through the eyes of a young boy. The novel’s narrator, who is omniscient and selective, takes the boy’s perspective as its central point.
Yes, important events happen. There are the accounts of familial squabbles, the usual socialist realist scenes from the workplace, the intrusion of historical events, places, and figures into the lives of the main characters, the dense cloud of intrigue in the context of the Soviet Show Trials, and etc. But these are filtered by the point of view of the boy, who cannot yet comprehend the full meaning of his experiences. The young child still has to master the rules and prohibitions pertaining to the field of language and culture, to which he is subjected to.
A telling scene, for example, shows the boy listening to his parents and grandmother discussing at the dining table the disappearance of a family friend. The adults, failing to notice the child listening in their midst, argued amongst themselves if they should help the friend’s relations and so on, as another, opposing the others, interjected that the disappeared was always-already of a dubious class background. It was only the belated discovery of the boy’s presence that ended their talk.
The novel’s jumping back and forth the years 1937 and 1942 occasionally disorients – an effect which in turn adds to the novel’s general atmosphere of horror which at the same time is indescribable because it is beyond the boy’s understanding. This structure of contrasts between the two years, wherein historically the former marking the height of the “Stalinist purges” and the latter marking the farthest advance Hitler’s armies gained into the Soviet Union during the Second World War, also functions to encapsulate the growth of the main characters within a definite passage of time.
From a formal stance, these devices succeed in placing a heightened sense of questioning not only in the boy, from whom the readers perceive the progress of the story, but the readers themselves. Disappearance is not simply another account of life in Moscow during the purges and the war. The novel’s title I think, does not only refer to those disappeared, those detained, those executed, or those forced to labor in penal camps, those whose situation can be likened to the hundreds of cases of forced disappearances and political killings in the Philippines today. Rather, it serves as a focal point for several threads that appear in the novel. Disappearance, for instance, also reveals how the commitment of the veterans of the revolution to building a new society was channeled towards the struggle against the enemies of the regime, both real and perceived, and how this eventually led to the decimation of their very own ranks.
Disappearance portrays the tragedy of the Soviet experience. It gives a glimpse of that truly sublime tragedy which was the gradual and brutal disappearance of the emancipatory possibilities opened up by the October Revolution and the subsequent construction of socialism.
From Disappearance by Trifonov
Contrary to the stereotype of the Soviet-era writer as epitomized by the figures of Nabokov, Pasternak, or Solzhenitsyn, Trifonov curiously did not fit the usual image of the émigré or underground writer. Among his contemporary writers, Trifonov had more or less fewer troubles with the authorities. One reason offered to account for this in Ellendea Proffer’s brief introduction to Disappearance is the fact that Trifonov’s style of writing “tended to mislead both critics and readers alike into thinking they were dealing with a writer who was perhaps unusual, but nonetheless orthodox at his core.”
While Disappearance could not have been published in Trifonov’s lifetime due to the provocative nature of the book’s theme, in a way, the same could be said of the style used in framing of the novel. There is a subtlety in Trifonov’s writing which seems to make harmless in Disappearance what could be deemed as offensive in other texts. This very same logic worked in Disappearance because of the device of having the narrative unfold through the eyes of a young boy. The novel’s narrator, who is omniscient and selective, takes the boy’s perspective as its central point.
Yes, important events happen. There are the accounts of familial squabbles, the usual socialist realist scenes from the workplace, the intrusion of historical events, places, and figures into the lives of the main characters, the dense cloud of intrigue in the context of the Soviet Show Trials, and etc. But these are filtered by the point of view of the boy, who cannot yet comprehend the full meaning of his experiences. The young child still has to master the rules and prohibitions pertaining to the field of language and culture, to which he is subjected to.
A telling scene, for example, shows the boy listening to his parents and grandmother discussing at the dining table the disappearance of a family friend. The adults, failing to notice the child listening in their midst, argued amongst themselves if they should help the friend’s relations and so on, as another, opposing the others, interjected that the disappeared was always-already of a dubious class background. It was only the belated discovery of the boy’s presence that ended their talk.
The novel’s jumping back and forth the years 1937 and 1942 occasionally disorients – an effect which in turn adds to the novel’s general atmosphere of horror which at the same time is indescribable because it is beyond the boy’s understanding. This structure of contrasts between the two years, wherein historically the former marking the height of the “Stalinist purges” and the latter marking the farthest advance Hitler’s armies gained into the Soviet Union during the Second World War, also functions to encapsulate the growth of the main characters within a definite passage of time.
From a formal stance, these devices succeed in placing a heightened sense of questioning not only in the boy, from whom the readers perceive the progress of the story, but the readers themselves. Disappearance is not simply another account of life in Moscow during the purges and the war. The novel’s title I think, does not only refer to those disappeared, those detained, those executed, or those forced to labor in penal camps, those whose situation can be likened to the hundreds of cases of forced disappearances and political killings in the Philippines today. Rather, it serves as a focal point for several threads that appear in the novel. Disappearance, for instance, also reveals how the commitment of the veterans of the revolution to building a new society was channeled towards the struggle against the enemies of the regime, both real and perceived, and how this eventually led to the decimation of their very own ranks.
Disappearance portrays the tragedy of the Soviet experience. It gives a glimpse of that truly sublime tragedy which was the gradual and brutal disappearance of the emancipatory possibilities opened up by the October Revolution and the subsequent construction of socialism.
From Disappearance by Trifonov
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews