Novel
Cement
Цемент
Fyodor Gladkov · 1925
Synopsis
March 1921, in a port city in the south. Gleb Chumalov, a Red Army soldier, returns from the civil war and finds the cement works abandoned, the workers scattered and his marriage in crisis: his wife Dasha works in the women's department of the party, and their daughter Nyura lives in a children's home. Gleb sets about getting the factory running again, against bureaucracy, famine and armed gangs, while Dasha refuses to go back to her former life.
Context
At Novorossiisk, during the civil war, the author had been attached to the party cell of the cement works and had taken part in getting it running again. He wrote the novel in Moscow, from 1922 to 1924; the book appeared in 1925 in the journal Krasnaya nov, then in volume form the following year. Gorky and Lunacharsky praised it, Mayakovsky and Brik criticised it. The author produced a new version in 1930 and a definitive version in 1944. The book was translated into French by Victor Serge as early as 1928.
Who it is for
A novel of reconstruction, to be read also as a document on the early years of the Soviet regime and the famine.
Prizes and reception
Probably the first Soviet novel devoted to postwar reconstruction, and a model for a whole literature; adapted for the stage by Heiner Müller in 1973.
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