The Sun of the Dead

Ivan Shmelev 1873-1950 - an outstanding Russian writer and Orthodox thinker, twice a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. A fierce opponent of the October Revolution and Bolshevism, he lived in exile in Paris from 1923. The Sun of... the Dead is an epic novel based on the author's life in Bolshevik Crimea in 1921-1922. For Shmelev, Crimea is both the hardships of the civil war, the horrible hunger, and the repressions he personally witnessed, but at the same time, it is the amazing nature of the peninsula: the sea, the mountains, and the sun… The Sun of the Dead - the first work written by the author in exile - brought Ivan Shmelev European fame. Read it if you have the courage, Thomas Mann. It is such a truth that you cannot even call it art. In Russian literature, the first genuine testimony about Bolshevism by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.