Bound by love, blood, and years
together, Gradov family members spanning three generations approach life
individually in the midst of their socialist society. I was glad to get to know
each person in this fictional, well-educated family whose best days center
around the Gradov home in the Silver Forest on the outskirts of Moscow. With
different fields of expertise and competing ideologies, each character faces
the upheaval, purges, punishment, and war in different geographical places
throughout the nation that was the Soviet Union from 1925-1945.
I wouldn’t exactly say I’m a fan
of Russian literature or history. Both are often a challenge to read with
hard-to-face realities, but I’ve been glad to have read every bit of Russian
literature that I’ve pushed on through. It fascinates me. This book is no
exception.
Multiple reviewers compare this
novel to War and Peace; I see that the narrative styles of the two books
could be compared. If you’ve read War and Peace, though, you’ll be getting an
entirely different experience with Generations of Winter. This book covers a
different historical period, hinges on close family relationships rather than
on people from different segments of society, and incorporates a positive tone
in spite of historically accurate, harsh, and even unsurvivable situations. Most Russian literature
I’ve encountered presents a crumbling of personhood or a struggle to survive; this novel, however, shows how
people live.
It was worth the time to read and is a novel I would hold onto for another day if it were my own.
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