SOURCE: A review of Moscow Saga, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 2, Spring, 1995, pp. 387-88.

In the following favorable review, Radley provides brief synopses of Generations of Winter, War and Prison, and Prison and Peace, which make up the three-volume set entitled Moscow Saga. Radley includes a brief discussion of three major techniques Aksyonov uses in the novels.

Beginning in 1925 with a conversation between an American newspaperman and a politically intriguing Russian political scientist and ending with the final years of the book's central character, Dr. Boris Nikolaevich Gradov, Vassily Aksyonov's major fictional chronicle of the bitter Stalin years evokes all the grandeur of Tolstoy and all the inhuman psychology of Dostoevsky. Aksyonov, arguably the finest novelist now writing in Russian, has abandoned the allusiveness of much of his earlier work to write directly of Russian history and current events.

There are two sets of protagonists, real and...