The story "House on the Embankment" begins with a man, Glebov, who is middle aged, balding, fat, and seeking to buy some furniture. It is around 1970, in the Soviet Union. While looking for the furniture, he notices an worker who appears familiar to him. It turns out to be a former friend, Shulepa, from his childhood days, who ignores Glebov after the latter calls out to him. Now Glebov is an elite member of Soviet society, so the question is raised as to how this successful academic is associated with this alcoholic loser.

The narrative then goes back to a time long since past, in the 1930s, before the Second World War. It is a tale of Glebov, Shulepa, and several other friends with names like "Bear" and "Walrus" growing up in or around a large apartment building in Moscow known as the "House on the Embankment." The House is a place of residence for those of the privileged class. The children are not much unlike those whom you or I may have grown up with. Trifonov does an excellent job of bringing every character in his novel to life. And there are certainly no shortage of characters in this story.

The narrative then gradually proceeds forward in time, to the War, to the 1950s when Glebov and Shulepa attended College, and finally up to the present time in which the novel began. There are many events which occur over the years, many tragic events; for example the disappearances of people during the Stalin era, and also things like unrequited love. As these events unfold, the reader begins to discover what was the cause of the animosity between Glebov and Shulepa in the beginning of the story. But Shulepa isn't the only one who hates Glebov, this man who has so little character.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this novel is the appearance of a second narrarator. The initial narrator is a 3rd person who is in the background; not an active participant in the events. The second narrator is different--he is actually one of the several friends in the story, and it is the readers' task to discover who the second narrator is. I read this story about 3 times before I narrowed down the choices to two different characters. After the 5th reading, and some research in the secondary literature to back up my conclusion, I discovered who it was. (I won't spoil it for you by telling you who it is here, but if you want to know, you can contact me.) Throughout the novel, these two narrators trade places, one distant and passive, the other one active and passionate in his narrative style.

This is a very beautiful novel, certainly worthy of the name "masterpiece." As I indicated earlier, I read this 5 times, and I found each read as interesting as the previous. Each time that you read it, you discover some subtle point which you missed the last time you read it; this is one of those stories in which the plots are so numerous, it is easy to miss something.

About the only thing that could stand some improvement is the translation of this work from the original Russian. (The original appeared in the literary magazine Druzhba Narodov in Jan. 1976, p.83) The translation is not bad, otherwise I might not give a good review here, however the translator, Glenny, leaves out certain intimacies between characters, and on some occasions, inserts or transforms sentences during the translation, of which I didn't see the necessity. I suffer from the belief that you should retain as much fidelity to the original during your translation, at least to the point where you begin to lose the reader because the expression you are translating does not have an equivalent in the second language.

If you can read Russian and have access to a good library, I suggest that you read the original. Otherwise, get this book, you won't be disappointed. There is another story in the book, which comes before "House," "Another Life." I haven't read it yet, so I am not reviewing it here. However, the book is worth the price with "House" alone.

The reviewer who says that this novel hasn't weathered the test of time got it right. Even as someone with a fair amount of background in the literature and history of twentieth-century Russia, I couldn't make it through this one. The plot (such as it is) alternates between the question of whether a particular Cossack leader in the Civil War was loyal to the Bolshevik cause or "merely" a Cossack nationalist and the machinations of several couples to acquire rights to a dacha, circa 1980. Fighting through the former requires a high level of interest in the various parties to the Civil War, and struggling through the latter requires a high degree of willingess to ponder Soviet law pertaining to the occupation of property. Throughout, the plot is thin and the character development virtually nonexistent. The reader gets a large platefull of arcane details that, I suspect, will primarily be of interest to historians and literary specialists of the Civil War period. (Or, as the other reviewer suggests, to those who focus on the literature of the Brezhnev era.)

I found Trifonov's "Another Life" similarly unreadable but I did enjoy "The House on the Embankment," the story of a man who conveniently looked the other way whenever his friends found trouble during Stalin's reign.

Though book blurb descriptions often exaggerate, the person who linked Tolstoy and Turgenev to Yuri Trifonov on the cover of my edition of THE OLD MAN was a true master of hyperbole...This lightweight tale of an old civil war veteran who survived purges, battles, disease, starvation, and exile to grow old by the 1970s may evoke sympathy on human grounds, it may arouse awareness of what the generation of 1917 in Russia went through, and it may bring to mind the paltry reward such suffering brought...I cannot say that this book will fascinate many readers in the world today, but that is not to say that it has (or rather HAD), no merit.

THE OLD MAN is above all a book that has not weathered time very well. It belongs to the Brezhnev era of the now-extinct Soviet Union, a time when speaking the truth was a risky act, if not as life-endangering as it had been under Stalin. Most authors preferred to play it safe and write works that did not challenge the official version of history or contemporary life. Trifonov deserves all credit for bringing a breath of fresh air into the stifled literary climate of those days. But if telling the truth about Party and individual behavior during the Civil War of 1918-1921 and showing the corruption and cynicism of later generations was attractive and courageous in 1980, it is not extremely startling today. No one now, in Russia or in the West, need remain in doubt about historical events or...mistakes (not to mention crimes) committed in the name of the Revolution. The old man himself was part of those crimes, committed perhaps in the fervent ardor of the desire for change, even forgotten by perpetrators, but crimes nevertheless. People lost all individual merit and were lumped into classes, pro or con. The Soviet Union was built on rigid class definitions, but by the 1970s, new classes had sprung up, the old did not matter. Trifonov notes (p.189) "The pharmacist's approach to humanity---or, more exactly, to individuals---survived for decades, for there is nothing more convenient than cut-and-dried formulas, but now everything has grown turbid. The vials have been broken and all the solutions and acids have run into one pool." To utter such sentiments, the author took considerable personal risk, but the book remains a relic of Brezhnev's times, right down to the inability of the author to use the word "Jew" in any shape or form, equivalent of Faulkner or Warren writing a novel without mentioning the words "black", "Negro" or "African". I sympathize with, maybe even admire Trifonov, but I can give his novel only three stars.