Novel
The Ordeal
Сотнікаў
Vasil Bykau · 1970
Synopsis
One winter of the German occupation, two partisans of a small detachment, Sotnikov, who is ill, and Rybak, who is sturdier, set out at night to find food. The first village has burned down; in the next, the elder, who serves the occupier, has no excuse but a “one has to”, and Rybak takes a sheep from him. On the way back, gunfire wounds Sotnikov; Rybak returns to fetch him and hides him at the house of a widow, Demchikha, where the wounded man's cough gives them away when the police arrive.
Context
The author took the story from an encounter in 1944: in a Romanian village, he recognised among the prisoners a former comrade who had gone over to the enemy. Written in 1969 in Belarusian under the title Liquidation, the text appeared in 1970 under that of Sotnikov, in Russian in Novy Mir and in Belarusian in Polymia; a Minsk edition restored the uncensored text in 2014. It was translated into English in 1972 and into French in 1974, and in 1977 Larissa Chepitko made it into The Ascent, Golden Bear at Berlin.
Who it is for
A short novel in Belarusian, translated into Russian by the author himself; translated into French, English and Spanish.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the most famous narratives about the German-Soviet war, and received with fervour by veterans.
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