Ordeal

The Ordeal (Khozhdenie po mukam) is Alexei Tolstoy's three-part epic, published as The Sisters (1922), 1918 (1928), and Bleak Morning (1941), and collected here as one trilogy.

The story opens in St. Petersburg on the eve of the First World War, following sisters Katya and Dasha Smokovnikov and the men drawn into their lives: Ivan Telegin, an engineer who becomes a soldier and prisoner of war, and Vadim Roschin, an army officer. As the war gives way to the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and then to civil war, the four are separated, endangered, and repeatedly thrown back together across a Russia being remade.

Tolstoy, who lived through the events himself and wrote the first volume in emigration in Paris, follows his characters through the collapse of the old imperial order and the violent birth of the new one, weaving their personal choices — in love, loyalty, and survival — into the larger historical current.