Ordeal

St. Petersburg, on the eve of the First World War. Sisters Katya and Dasha Smokovnikov live in a city that is about to lose its old order, and two men enter their lives: Ivan Telegin, an engineer, and Vadim Roschin, an army officer.

The war pulls everyone apart. Telegin becomes a soldier and then a prisoner of war. The February and October Revolutions of 1917 follow, then the civil war, and the four characters are separated, put in danger and thrown back together again and again across a country being remade.

This is a historical epic in three parts, collected here as one trilogy: The Sisters (1922), 1918 (1928) and Bleak Morning (1941). The original Russian title is Khozhdenie po mukam. The book follows private choices about love, loyalty and survival alongside the fall of the imperial order and the violent arrival of the new one.

Alexei Tolstoy lived through these events himself, and he wrote the first volume in emigration in Paris. The scale is large, the span covers several years of upheaval, and the focus stays on four people caught in it.