The Road to Calvary

The Road to Calvary, also translated as Ordeal, is a trilogy of novels by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, tracing the fate of the Russian intelligentsia on the eve of, during, and after the revolution of 1917. It consists of the novels Sisters (1918–1922; «Сёстры»), The Eighteenth Year (1927–1928; «Восемнадцатый год») and Gloomy Morning (1940–1941; «Хмурое утро»). The first part was written for the émigré readers, while the rest was written as a work of Socialist realism. Background The first part, Sisters, was written from 1918 to 1920, during the author's emigration, while the rest he wrote after his return to Soviet Russia. The novel Sisters was published in the White émigré journals Gryadushchaya Rossiya and Sovremennye zapiski under the title Walking Through Torments. In 1941, after the start of the Great Patriotic War, Tolstoy reworked the 2 first parts and wrote the third one as works of socrealism. Plot In the first chapters of the epic, St. Petersburg is shown in the beginning of 1914. Sisters Daria (Dasha) Bulavin and Ekaterina (Katya) Bulavin, originally from Samara, are carried away by the poet-decadent Aleksei Bessonov. Katya is married to Nikolai Smokovnikov, a lawyer, and has an illicit affair behind his back.