The Rout

Over hills and through the dense taiga and swamps a detachment of Red partisans is making its way, fleeing from Cossack forces. Betrayed by a coward, beaten by the Cossacks, only nineteen men remain. Such is the plot of this Russian novel, originally published in 1926.

"And so, full of youthful hopes, with books by Maxim Gorky and Nekrasov stuffed in our school-bags, we entered the Revolution.

"We were full of the noble ideas of liberation, for Siberia and the Russian Far East were at the time in the hands of Admiral Kolchak, whose regime was even more cruel than the tsar's. We were full of the noble ideas of patriotism, for our native land was groaning under the ironheel of the Japanese invaders.

"As a writer, I was born in those times."

Alexander Fadeyev entered Soviet literature and at once justly occupied a place in the top ranks with his novel "The Rout," a supremely striking book, which is, perhaps, the most stern and striking of the books about the Civil War. His last finished work was "The Young Guard," a similarly stern, truthful novel about the Great Patriotic War, the German occupation, the tragic and decisive year of 1942.