The Double Murder in Pil'niak's the Tale of the Unextinguished Moon

If there is a tide in the affairs of men, then for the Soviet writer Boris Pil'niak (1894-1937) such a point was reached with his writing in 1926 of Povest' nepogashennoi luny, which tells about an army commander who is summoned to the Town by the party's number one man.1 The commander, Nikolai Gavrilov, and the number one man or unbending man (Herop6rHiHHcsK ieJIoseK) are very old friends; they both hastened the advent of the Revolution and together fought for its success. Gavrilov has an ulcer, which he tries to ignore, but which, nevertheless, makes him concentrate on things internal to himself rather than on the outside world. The unbending man orders his friend to have the ulcer operated on so that he can devote himself totally to his role in the Revolution. Gavrilov dies as a result of this operation. Whether Pil'niak intended it or not, various readers who came across his story in late 1925 and early 1926 refused to consider it merely as a work of art; rather, they treated it as a real-life account of the death, in October 1925, of the Red Army commander, Mikhail Frunze.2 Pil'niak chose to write an explanatory note in which he denied any possible connection between the real and fictional worlds; however

Ancient history · Art · Astronomy · Full moon · Physics · History · Soviet and Russian History