The Impatient Ones

This is a novel about people who killed a tsar, published by the state that descended from them, and it ends on a scaffold with nothing said about what any of it was for.

Andrei Zhelyabov is driven through the Petersburg streets to his execution. The crowd shouts. A young woman perched on the pediment of a street lamp makes a timid, welcoming gesture and is pulled down at once, and it looks as if she is being beaten. The carts come out into the square, the sky clears, and there rises from the earth the smell of melting snow and puddles that had always gone to his head when he was a child.

There is no forward look. No 1905, no 1917, no line drawn from this gallows to the Finland Station. A Soviet novel of 1978 about the People's Will ends with a man smelling the spring he remembers from childhood, on his way to be hanged, and stops. Everything worth saying about the book follows from noticing that.

Trifonov was the finest Soviet novelist of his generation and the most careful about what he did not say. The text is the Progress Publishers printing of 1978, in the Soviet Authors Library, translated by Robert Daglish, reproduced complete, with a new critical introduction written for this edition.