The Rout (novel)
괴멸 (소설)
A 1927 novel by Alexander Fadeyev. A Red partisan detachment in the Ussuri region during the Civil War, hunted by Japanese troops and Cossacks, crosses a swamp, breaks through an ambush and survives as nineteen men. It grew from the author's own partisan experience and became a Soviet school text and model of Socialist Realism.
In depth
What is the story?
A partisan detachment in the Ussuri region has grown used to peace in a village. When the commander Levinson orders his orderly Morozka to carry a letter, Morozka grumbles that someone else should go. Levinson calmly tells him to hand in his gun and leave. Morozka, a miner who has done everything without thinking, realises he cannot leave and takes the letter.
On the way he carries off a wounded man abandoned by a detachment fleeing the Japanese: Pavel Mechik, a town youth who joined the partisans to be a hero. In the field hospital Mechik grows close to Morozka's wife, the nurse Varya, and for the first time in his life Morozka feels jealous. Caught stealing melons, he nearly gets expelled at a village meeting and swears never to disgrace the name of partisan and miner again.
The Japanese draw near and the detachment must retreat. Here comes the cruellest scene. Levinson and the doctor decide to poison Frolov, a mortally wounded man they cannot take. Mechik overhears and tries to stop it, but Frolov understands what he is being offered and drinks. Metelitsa, sent to scout, is caught, lunges at the Cossack commander during his interrogation and is shot. The hunted detachment runs into a swamp and lays a log road across it.
At the end Mechik is sent ahead as a scout and meets Cossacks. Too frightened to warn his comrades, he flees. Morozka, riding behind, fires the three agreed shots and dies. The detachment breaks through with only nineteen men left.
Why did it become required reading?
By 1979 it had been printed 255 times, about 16 million copies, and belonged to the Soviet school programme, held up as a model of Socialist Realism. Yet its strength lies not in heroics but in a doubting commander and in defeat. Everyone sees Levinson as flawless, though he hesitates. The miner Morozka dies while the bookish town youth Mechik survives: that is the author's answer on who carries a revolution to the end, and the book does not conceal that this revolution had to poison its wounded.
What did the author live through?
Fadeyev joined a Communist special detachment in 1919 and fought in the Far East until 1921, and the characters have real prototypes; Levinson's is Iosif Pevzner. It grew from a sketch called "Metelitsa", written while he lived in a newspaper building in Rostov.
It was also trimmed by censors. Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky attacked the censorship office that passed it, listing dozens of "impermissible words and expressions", and later editions dropped the coarse language. Gorky wrote from Sorrento: "Fadeyev's book is very talentedly done." Fadeyev later headed the Soviet Writers' Union.
On screen?
Nikolai Beresnev filmed it in 1931, and Youth of Our Fathers followed in 1958. In 1969 Mark Zakharov staged it at the Mayakovsky Theatre with Armen Dzhigarkhanyan as Levinson.