Donald Rayfield

Party Walls

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

By

Princeton University Press 1,104pp £29.95 order from our bookshop

The House of Government is familiar to many Russians (and some foreigners) as the House on the Embankment, a vast building on an island facing the Kremlin, where from the 1930s to the end of the Soviet era around seven hundred government ministers and important officials lived in ostentatious luxury (the building has since been privatised). The House on the Embankment is the title of a semi-autobiographical novella by Yuri Trifonov, who grew up there in the 1930s and reflected deeply, albeit with some sentimentality, on the often grim fates of the building’s leaseholders. By a miracle or an oversight of the censors, Trifonov’s novella was published in 1976. Although Soviet libraries refused to issue readers with the journal in which it was printed, the work became a sensation with the Moscow public.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'It would be nice to think that women will achieve equal pay in my lifetime, rather than to watch gloomily as stati… ,
    • In 1660, two of the signatories of King Charles I's death warrant fled across the Atlantic to New England. But were… ,
    • Howard Jacobson's sixteenth novel is 'a love story of sorts, one characterised not by physical desire or even conta… ,
    • 'The sudden immersion in the new and unfamiliar can lead people to write with a rare lack of self-consciousness' P… ,
    • 'Pools bend the rules. Clothes slip off, skin glistens, consciousness heightens. A dreamlike scenario unfolds' Jam… ,
    • 'Although he surely didn’t know W H Auden’s theory that every high C proclaims human freedom and our capacity to tr… ,
    • RT : With beginning tomorrow, we've uncovered a 1997 article from the archive reviewing 'Golf Dream… ,
    Follow Us