VICTOR NEKRASOV
55
trench. The author cannot see beyond his parapet." Thus wrote Alexan–
der Fadeev, Secretary General of the Writers' Union. His remarks did
not, to be fair, prevent the Secretariat or the Presidium, at whose meet–
ing he spoke, from admitting the author to the Writers' Union, an un–
precedented event.
A year later, the same Fadeev, Chairman of the Stalin Prize Com–
mittee, struck the author's name from the list of candidates which had
been sent for Stalin's consideration . But God's ways are inexplicable.
The next morning the author saw his picture in
Pravda
and
Izvestiya.
(Vishnevsky later conceded to the author, in private, after closing his of–
fice door as a precaution, "Only the big man himself could have given
the signal. No one else," and waved his hands in a gesture of powerless–
ness.)
From that day on, the book was held up as a model. All of the
publishing houses began printing and reprinting it non-stop. Translations
appeared in every conceivable language. Critics praised it
ad infinitum,
forgetting that only a short while before the author had been accused of
pacifism and Remarquism. A decade later, the film "Soldiers,". based on
the book, was shot. It, too, was destined to have a complicated fate.
Today, the book has been banned in the USSR, blacklisted, and re–
moved from all libraries; it is said that only in Lefortovo Prison does a
copy still exist. The film, which suffered a fate of its own, is occasionally
shown on military holidays such as Red Army Day and Victory Over
Germany Day.
Forty years have thus elapsed since the war broke out. And thirty–
five from the moment that the last sentence in the manuscript at the time
it was called
On Earth's Edge,
was finished. That day the author ran to
Elena Petrovna, a typist he knew, and began dictating the text page by
page. The author, or rather I, was thirty-five at the time. I am now sev–
enty. Half my life before the book. And half my life after.
The first half consisted of childhood, adolescence, and youth. I was
basically apolitical, although early in life I got used to reading newspa–
pers, primarily
Proletarskaya Pravda.
During the civil war I rooted for the
White Army generals Deniken, Kolchak, and Wrangel. As a thirteen–
year- old boy, in 1924, while stamping my feet against the cold on the
Kreshchatik to the blasts of factor sirens, my ears were frostbitten - Lenin
had died.
I never joined either the Pioneers or the Komsomol; I could not
take them or Soviet power seriously. All of my close friends at trade
school and college thought likewise. We did our best to get out of po–
litical lectures, dialectical materialism, and civics. When they really put
