A Story about a Real Man

A novel about the most decorated kind of Soviet courage opens with an animal that cannot read. For several pages there is no human being in it at all. Wolves go back into the forest to digest the night's kill; a woodpecker taps so cleanly in the frost it seems to be tapping a violin. A magpie hears something big coming and goes.

The dogfight that brought down the man this book is about is then described as the elk is obliged to take it - as weather, and insects, and a bird. It is the best writing in the book, and it is over in a few pages.

What follows is the story of a pilot who loses both legs and flies again, drawn from a real airman Polevoi met at the Kursk Salient in 1943 and filled notebooks about until dawn. The 1973 printing does something no other book in this series does: in place of a critic's essay it prints four pages headed ABOUT THE AUTHOR, by Hero of the Soviet Union Alexei Maresyev. The subject of the novel introduces the novel about himself.

The text here is the Foreign Languages Publishing House Third Edition, the revision of 1957 - the year after the Twentieth Congress. Neither printing carries a note saying the English was worked over, or what the revision did.

Translated by the late Joe Fineberg, who also carried Lenin's What Is to Be Done? into English.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.