The Twenty-seventh Man (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Nathan Englander
- First Published: 1999
- Type of Plot: Metafiction, frame story
- Time of Work: Between 1949 and 1953
- Setting: Prison in Russian village X
- Principal Characters: Pinchas Pelovits, Vasily Korinsky, Moishe Bretzky, Y. Zunser
- Genres: Short fiction
- Subjects: 1950’s, Communism or communists, Politics, Prisoners, Prisons, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, 1940’s, Villages, Capital punishment, Jews or Jewish life, Censorship, Torture, Eastern Europe or eastern Europeans, Jews and Gentiles, Russia or Russian people
- Locales: Russia
The Story
The main action in the “The Twenty-seventh Man” occurs within the Russian village of X and its prison. Orders are issued from Joseph Stalin's country house to arrest twenty-seven writers and take them to the prison on the same day so that they can all be killed by the same burst of gunfire. Pairs of agents are to carry out the arrests simultaneously and in secrecy. Four arrests are explained in detail.
The first capture is of Vasily Korinsky, whose wife causes problems by hitting one of the arresting officers in the head. Korinsky, who would have gone along...
[The entire page is 1553 words long]
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