The Forty-First

The Forty-First is a novella by the Soviet writer Lavrenyov, published in 1924 and the most widely read of his works. Set during the Russian Civil War, it begins when a Red guerrilla unit, breaking out of encirclement, captures a White Army lieutenant. Commissar Yevsyukov, believing the prisoner holds important intelligence, decides to send him by sea to headquarters. A young fisherwoman and excellent markswoman, Maryutka, is ordered to escort him with two soldiers who can swim. A sudden storm capsizes the boat; the two soldiers drown, and Maryutka and the lieutenant are cast by the waves onto a deserted island. Far from the battlefield, these two young people—utterly different in class allegiance, faith, upbringing, and aspirations—move from hostility to conversation, from poetry and literature to their mutual loneliness, and gradually a warmth of mutual dependence grows between them; Maryutka tastes love for the first time. Then a White Army ship suddenly approaches the island. The lieutenant, overjoyed, runs toward it, and in that instant class allegiance and a soldier's duty reawaken. A shot rings out: the lieutenant becomes the forty-first enemy Maryutka has killed, and she falls to her knees in the seawater, weeping over the "blue eyes" she has shattered with her own hands. Short and tightly plotted, the novella uses the extreme situation of the deserted island to interrogate the conflict between revolution and humanity, duty and love, and is regarded as a distinctive work in Soviet Civil War literature. This edition uses Cao Jinghua's classic translation and, besides the ten chapters of the main text, includes the translator's afterword, a note on the revised edition, and related commemorative pieces.