A Week

This novel, published in 1922, is set in a small town in the Ural mountains. As the title suggests, the action takes place in a single week in the spring of 1921. While a party of soldiers is out of town to obtain wood for fuel, the town is attacked by a peasant force seeking to overturn the Communist revolution. The central character, Gornuikh, aged 19, emerges from the days of slaughter as the chief official of the town’s administration, replacing senior party members who had been killed in the revolt.

The author, Yuri Libedinsky (born 10 December 1898), was born in Odessa but grew up in the Ural mountains. He joined the Communist Party in 1920 and was a political commissar in the Red Army during the Civil War. Following the success of his debut novel (this one), he became involved in the Oktyabr literary movement that promoted proletarian literature. He wrote numerous political novels, including several set in the Caucasus. Two volumes of memoir were published, one in 1958 and another posthumously in 1962.

During the conflict between the Communist forces and the rebels, there are several instances when the First World War is recalled. In one scene, Seletsky, a battalion commander, “was riding from end to end of the battalion, assuring himself over and over again that everything had been done as it should have been done... machine guns in the centre and patrols sent out on the right flank, together with cavalry scouts”. He ponders the essence of warfare and thinks back seven years when he “led his company to the attack and was full of enthusiasm and dreamed of a heroic death for Russia” but then remembers how “in the opaque gloom of the trenches, what with illness, contusions and wounds, this enthusiasm had withered.”