Alexander Serafimovich

The Iron Flood (Железный поток, 1924) is Serafimovich's masterpiece and a monumental achievement of early Soviet prose. The novel is based on an actual episode: in the summer of 1918, the Taman Army, encircled by White forces, broke out under the command of Yevgeny Kovtyukh (Kozhukh in the novel) and marched along the Black Sea coast toward Armavir. Tens of thousands of starving, ragged soldiers and refugees cut through the Caucasus mountains and enemy lines in a collective heroic epic: the true protagonist is not an individual but the mass itself, rendered as an 'iron flood.'

Drawing on the field instincts honed as a war correspondent and the vernacular rhythms of his Don Cossack upbringing, Serafimovich captured the movement of vast human collectives in a terse, urgent prose style. The novel married the Tolstoyan tradition of war writing with revolutionary optimism, won immediate acclaim from Lunacharsky and Gorky, and was translated into dozens of languages, gaining international stature. In the 1930s, Nikolai Okhlopkov staged it at the Realistic Theatre, and Sergei Eisenstein planned a film adaptation. It was derailed in 1937 by Kovtyukh's arrest. It was finally brought to the screen in 1967 by director Yefim Dzigan as a colour widescreen feature.