“Procrustean Bed, or the Road to Paradise” is the name given to his autobiographical story by Nikanor Koval (1922–2000), who, as an eleven-year-old teenager, survived the terrible famine of the early 1930s in Ukraine and vowed to write about it.
“Procrustean Bed, or the Road to Paradise” is the name given to his autobiographical story by Nikanor Koval (1922–2000), who, as an eleven-year-old teenager, survived the terrible famine of the early 1930s in Ukraine and vowed to write about it. The text was created in the 40s and 50s, a time when trying to tell the truth was considered a crime. Twice the manuscript had to be destroyed because of the threat of a search and at night, on a trophy typewriter, restored anew. The name «Krushilovka of the thirtieth year» was given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who highly appreciated the original author’s manuscript. Written in a lively, colorful and figurative language, a personal eyewitness account of the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” leaves an impression much more poignant than official statistics — in this case, also because the terrible pictures of collectivization were seen through the eyes of a boy. Behind the history of the ruin and desecration of the family of the middle peasant who refused to go to the collective farm is the history of the country. But, perhaps, the main thing is the light that remains after reading from the inner world of the characters, who, in desperate attempts to survive, have retained human dignity.
RUSSIAN PATH, 376 p.