Derzhavin, or The Collapse of the Empire

Yuri Dombrovsky (1909–1978) — a prose writer, poet, who went through several arrests, camps, exiles and did not break. The author of the novels “The Monkey Comes for Its Skull,” “The Keeper of Antiquities,” “The Faculty of Useless Things,” “The Birth of a Mouse.” “Derzhavin, or The Collapse of the Empire” is the first and unfinished novel, published in 1937–1938, which now seems impossible for those years, in the magazine “Literary Kazakhstan.” The young second lieutenant Gavriil Derzhavin (not yet a famous poet and not an important state figure) must catch the rebellious convict Pugachev, who took the name of the deceased emperor. Dombrovsky's Derzhavin does not want to be an executioner, but he is also not going to retreat from the existing order, he is a “man of rules” and sees that “there is treason everywhere.” “But rebellions,” said Derzhavin, “but the blood that has flooded the land, but the fires, the gallows? Did you know what you were doing? You, as an educated person, how could you lead this blinded crowd?” “Dombrovsky peered into the abyss of the relationships of fate and the poet, genius and villainy.” “Derzhavin” is not a romanticized biography, but a vigorous debut, full of sharp situations and infused with a high-voltage current.” Yuri Davydov