[In the review below, Lehmann-Haupt faults Generations of Winter for its use of archaic jargon and slang but nevertheless calls the book "monumental" and finds the language less distracting as the novel progresses.]

There are a few hurdles to overcome before you can get caught up in the powerful sweep of Vassily Aksyonov's Generations of Winter, a Tolstoyan historical novel that is a departure from the author's previous, less traditional fiction (The Island of Crimea, Say Cheese!, The Burn) and traces the roller-coaster fortunes of one Russian family from 1925, the year of Stalin's ascent to power, to 1945, the end of World War II.

"'So you're not afraid?'" asks an American journalist in Moscow on page 10 "with the directness of a quarterback shotgunning the ball across midfield into his opponent's territory." The metaphor seems as anachronistic as some of the slang the characters employ, with their references to women as broads, food as grub and the head as a noggin.

"'All right, let's go chow down!'" one character says "delightedly, even though at one time, he found this sort of Moscow Communist slang repulsive." "Chow down" is Moscow Communist slang? This will come as surprising news to veterans of the United States Army. In short, those who translated Generations from the Russian seem at times to be groping wildly.

Yet the deeper you get into Mr. Aksyonov's story, the more trivial the lapses in dialogue seem. What first catches your interest is the scene in which Boris Nikitovich Gradov, a fictional Moscow surgeon, is called away from a party at his home to attend to the Commissar for Defense, Mikhail Frunze, an actual historical figure, who has collapsed from a hemorrhaging ulcer. Frunze whispers desperately to Gradov that he doesn't require surgery. Gradov agrees. But a team of Kremlin physicians decides to operate anyway, and when Gradov objects, he is told to wait in an adjoining room. Of course Frunze dies, and Gradov begins to experience what will shortly become an epidemic of bad consciences.

This scene will later be mirrored when Gradov is called to the Kremlin to look after Stalin himself, who has gone into convulsions from being constipated. In the interval, both of Gradov's sons have been arrested and sent to the gulag—the older one, Gen. Nikita Borisovich, on the trumped-up charge of conspiring against the revolution with his immediate superior, Marshal Vasily Blücher; the younger one, Kirill, for being Nikita's brother.

When Gradov relieves Stalin's agony with an enema, the tyrant is wordlessly grateful. As the passage reads: "The human face surfaced and trembled nearby. Ask for anything, Professor, and it's yours. Ask me for your sons, and they'll be with you in two days. Ask me now, Professor, while I want to thank you; later on it will be too late." But Gradov cannot bring himself to ask a favor of a patient. Later, when he meets Stalin at a Kremlin gathering, they shake hands. "They looked each other in the eye for several seconds. If he asks me about his sons now, I'll destroy him, thought Stalin."

The Gradov family is endlessly appealing, from Boris's Georgian wife, Mary Vakhtangovna, who comforts the family by playing Chopin on the piano, to their daughter Nina, a tempestuously romantic poet who worships Osip Mandelstam. But the real protagonist is the novel's narrator, who modulates his voice limitlessly. He steps up close to describe the most intimate of love scenes and the most brutal incidents of torture in the basement of the infamous Lubyanka. He backs far away to report the great battles that turned away the invading Nazis in the winter of 1941 and the sickening massacre of Ukrainian Jews in a ravine near Chernigov in the summer of 1943.

This narrator waxes chatty when parsing Tolstoy's theory of history in War and Peace. He turns satiric in describing Lenin's return to earth as a large male squirrel. And he disappears from the page in Dos Passos-like intermissions that sum up history according to stories in the press.

That this voice is endlessly mutable is just as well, because some of the scenes it describes are so extreme in their cruelty or treachery that no appropriate comment is left to be made.

Irina, Nina Gradov's editor at Working Woman, a newspaper, remarks of an article Nina has written that it contains "traces of your habitual irony." She adds: "The time for irony is over, Nina. It is our fate to live in heroic times." To which Nina responds, "Without irony, Irka, it's simply impossible to get through these heroic times." Without irony, it's impossible to get through the events of Mr. Aksyonov's novel.

The narrator does convey movingly why good people continued to fight and die for the Soviet Union. After Nikita Gradov is rehabilitated and given command of a special strike force to attack the invading Germans, he is decorated by Stalin. At the ceremony, he wonders what would happen if he ordered his bodyguards "to wipe out this whole group." A moment later: "A wave of genuine, unfeigned enthusiasm suddenly washed over him, having its origins in his total attachment to everything that at that moment embodied his country, even to this collection of faces, to them especially and particularly, a group that just a few minutes before, he had imagined as the targets of his loyal machine gunners."

At the end of this monumental story you learn that Nikita's brother, Kirill, is still alive in the gulag. He has discovered Jesus Christ. For an instant you think that here is Mr. Aksyonov's message: the only rational response to Russian history is religious faith. But then you remember that up until this point Kirill Gradov has been the most rigidly doctrinaire of Marxists. All the narrator is saying is that Kirill has switched religions.

Or is that really all the narrator is saying? Maybe faith is his message after all.