The Courtyard — Arkady Lvov

THE

COURTYARD

Set in Stalinist Russia between 1936 and 1956, The Courtyard spans twenty of the most crucial years of Soviet history. In the southern city of Odessa, ten families share a common courtyard in a once grand but now seedy apartment building presided over by the forbidding Comrade Degtyar, the local Communist Party representative. The people themselves are earthy, boisterous, and determined to survive; they are doctors and factory workers, artists and businessmen, devoted party members and dangerous individualists. Emotions run high as the building's inhabitants - who constantly meet and interact in the courtyard - are engulfed by the political absurdities of a ruthless party bureaucracy as it consolidates power and gives an adolescent Soviet system its tragically definitive form.

This is at once a remarkable novel of the most bizarre and secretive era of Soviet society and a moving chronicle of the lives of Russian citizens struggling to survive as their ideological dream becomes a political nightmare.