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Many intellectuals consider Children of the Arbat to be the most important work of fiction by a Soviet author since Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, not least because it treats subjects that Soviet literature has never dealt with before. Rybakov's book is an attempt to come to literary terms with the Stalin era, just as Pasternak tried to give literary meaning to the Russian revolution and civil war of his own generation. But unlike Doctor Zhivago, which first appeared in Italian, Children of the Arbat is coming out in its author's native land and language.
The book's publication is due in large part to Rybakov's patience. Says he: "Twice before, in 1966 and 1978, it was announced that this book would be published. Both times it was stopped. This time I believe it will succeed." For all those 20 years Rybakov rejected offers to publish it in the West despite the frustration of repeated rejection by Soviet authorities. "My people and my country need this novel," he says. "It must be published at home before it is published abroad."
The book obviously has high-level support. No apparatchik would have dared authorize it without powerful political backing. Rybakov does not know if Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev has seen it or cleared it. "The reason it is being permitted now must be that those on high must have felt it was timely and needed," says Rybakov. "They must have realized that until we have eliminated the consequences of Stalinism in the psychology of our people we cannot move further forward. If we say we wish to live honestly and truthfully, then we must be truthful about the past. We cannot bring up our children on lies."
The first to agree with that proposition was Alexander Tvardovsky, former editor of the literary journal Novy Mir, which in 1962 published Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a book about life in a Stalinist prison camp. Tvardovsky ran a notice in 1966 saying that the first part of Children of the Arbat would appear in 1967. It never did. In 1978 another monthly, Oktyabr, included Children of the Arbat in a list of books to be serialized in 1979. But again the year passed with neither publication nor explanation. The version that begins running this week in Druzhba Narodov, a publication of the Soviet Writers Union, is 600 pages long and will appear in the magazine's April, May and June issues. Rybakov expects that a Soviet publishing house will eventually produce a hardback edition.
Children of the Arbat is a popular success even before its appearance. The manuscript has been read and commented upon by half a dozen newspapers and magazines. Druzhba Narodov long ago stopped selling subscriptions because its limited press run of 150,000 copies has already been sold out. Thousands of would-be readers are on waiting lists for library copies, and subscribers report that friends are begging to read their copies. The black-market price of the April issue of Druzhba Narodov, which sells for 1 ruble 10 kopecks ($1.65), is expected to soar to more than 50 rubles ($75). Meanwhile, foreign publishers are bidding briskly for rights, with offers reportedly running past $100,000.