Peltse and Pentameron

by Volodymyr Dibrova

Book Overview

In these two novellas, Volodymyr Dibrova tells the story of how the Soviet system was sustained by individuals who never truly believed in it, but simply lacked the courage to oppose it.

Peltse portrays the formation of an average apparatchik. Both funny and alarming, it provides a psychological portrait of an individual trapped in a system he simultaneously dislikes and depends upon for survival. Pentameron tells the story of...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810112191
• ISBN13: 9780810112193
• Release Date: December 1996
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Length: 198 Pages

Customer Reviews

A gem of a snapshot from Soviet-era Ukraine

The "Unbound Europe" series gives us another unexpected source of enjoyment (check out Selimovic's "Death and the Dervish" for a book that could change your life). Dibrova writes a 50-page long short-story, "Peltse" about an otherwise miserable and undistinguished kid who fantasizes about his glorious future. Or is it fantasy?"Pentameron" is a quick-moving day in the life of five administrative functionaries, and in just 150 pages Dibrova manages to lay bare for us the fears, paranoias, concerns, hopes and (few though they may be) joys in the lives of these people. Having visited Ukraine in the mid-1980s I was especially pleased to catch in these pages what I consider to have been a glimpse inside all those monolithic government buildings I passed by in Kiev.A short and sweet read that will confirm - and illuminate - many of the suspicions (dare I say stereotypes) that westerners held about the Soviet bloc in the 1970s and '80s.