[In the following favorable review, Radley provides brief synopses of Generations of Winter, War and Prison, and Prison and Peace, which make up the three-volume set entitled Moscow Saga. Radley includes a brief discussion of three major techniques Aksyonov uses in the novels.]

Beginning in 1925 with a conversation between an American newspaperman and a politically intriguing Russian political scientist and ending with the final years of the book's central character, Dr. Boris Nikolaevich Gradov, Vassily Aksyonov's major fictional chronicle of the bitter Stalin years evokes all the grandeur of Tolstoy and all the inhuman psychology of Dostoevsky. Aksyonov, arguably the finest novelist now writing in Russian, has abandoned the allusiveness of much of his earlier work to write directly of Russian history and current events.

There are two sets of protagonists, real and fictional, in the three-volume Moskovskaia saga (Moscow Saga). The fictional ones revolve around the Gradovs, a family pictured in several generations, commencing with Dr. Gradov, a dedicated physician and author whose aim is to cure wherever possible. Twice he is given the possibility of helping Stalin: early in volume 1, Pokolenie zimy (Generations of Winter), he relieves the brute's crippling constipation, prompting the latter's exhortation to ask for whatever he wants. Gradov refuses, even though his two sons have been arrested and his daughter is in hiding. One son has become enamored of communist theory, though this does not save him from exile to Siberia, where, at the end of volume 2, Voina i tiur'ma (War and Prison), he has become a religious convert. The other son is eventually rehabilitated so as to serve as a general during the Great War, and then, on the point of arrest again, he is killed. The daughter is a poet reminiscent of Akhmatova, with whom she shares the terror of writing on threat of death.

On the eve of Stalin's death, Gradov is again summoned to the Kremlin, this time to confirm (or deny) a diagnosis Stalin does not wish to hear. This painful scene is a metaphor of the entire trilogy: our dedicated and moral, much-suffering hero must face his past—i.e., Stalin—and help it. He is professional enough to tell Stalin in volume 3, Tiur'ma i mir (Prison and Peace), that he "would recommend … a complete change in [his] way of life … [and that he] no longer work." As Gradov speaks, the reader goes back over all the horrors depicted in the earlier pages and contemplates what this means now to Russian history, and would have meant, if it had come true earlier. Would none of these all too familiar horrors have come to pass? We have been through the arrests, the beatings—a particularly brutal one of a Jewish woman that makes its disgusting leader, Stroilo, a Soviet bureaucratic horror, come to a sexual climax is a metaphor for them all—the camps, the war (Gorni [Babi] Yar is evoked in terrifying detail). Why not kill Stalin, the reader wonders?

Aksyonov's point is that where the real characters are concerned, the events must be those of historical truth. And that historical truth is everywhere. Major (Stalin and Beria in particular) and minor (Bazarov, a minor communist theoretician; Ordzhonokidze, a Georgian communist whom Stalin destroyed) characters are thrown into the novelistic mix. In every case where one interacts with a fictional character, the events are either true or believable. Thus Beria's befriending of a Gradov friend and taking him to Moscow with him to do his dirty work serves the historical novel's purpose: to make the reader aware that the Gradovs themselves are swimming, against their will, in this filth, all the while giving us the goods on the real perpetrators.

So much has been written, both fact and fiction, on this period, that it would have been unwise for Aksyonov to attempt to write investigative history. He does not try. He is giving us instead a re-created Russia and what some for the most part sympathetic folk did to survive it. Dr. Gradov is present from beginning to end, as a kind of unwilling patriarch who manages to live up to his own doctor's credo. His story, Aksyonov makes clear, is not unique. Indeed, it would have been completely lost had not the "packet" which contained it been "sold in 1991 for 300 dollars to an American tourist on the Arbat." The reader, however, will not learn history: he will, rather, learn of those possibilities ignored by history which now reside as fiction.

Aksyonov would not be Aksyonov without authorial tricks. I list three kinds below; the reader should note that there are many others. 1) The author intervenes on numerous occasions to inform the reader of what he is about to see, and appears as a weary but wise guide: at the beginning of part 3 he tells us of Stalin the "God," not "God, Creator of all Things" but rather the "usurper of the revolution's bright ideas" who, amazingly, owned five different cars in which he rode through Moscow. It is up to the writer to investigate this phenomenon: "And so, we have come to this moment where we begin our third volume, toward the end of the forties, when the country, having displayed miracles of courage, was burdened by the stunning fear of Stalin's five cars." This is where the fictionist outshines the historian: he can investigate the five cars and attempt an explanation, and in so doing he can possibly explain an age and an era.

2) The author/narrator invades the personal life of the Kremlin and its leaders, particularly its sexuality and its biological functions. The book is full of references to Stalin's constipation and Beria's "shit" and evokes, in particularly vulgar vocabulary, the vicious sexuality of the communist leaders. This coarseness is a calculated effect: it is Aksyonov's statement on the events. When Dr. Gradov cures Stalin's constipation, Aksyonov slyly stresses that this in no way meant that there was no shit left in Stalin. 3) At several points in the book, in classic Dos Passos style, Aksyonov provides actual contemporaneous press-clipping excerpts from Russian and Western books, magazines, and newspapers. This is always followed by a prose poem which serves as a perspective through time on the events: Aksyonov moves back to the eighteenth century only to jump forward to the 1980s.

Moskovskaia saga is a major work and a major achievement. A review of this length cannot begin to do it justice. Suffice it to say that anyone who cares about Russian literature today must read it.