Requiem for a Lost Empire

"The book flashes back to the narrator's grandfather, Nikolai, a Red cavalry soldier fighting the Whites in 1920 who one day, overwhelmed by all the senseless killing, deserts and returns to his native village. On his way home, in a forest riddled with the graves of soldiers who had been buried alive by their killers, he finds and disinters a young woman whom be saves and eventually marries. A son is born, Pavel, the narrator's father, whose story of World War II is invoked with a passion and force that bear comparison to the best writing on the subject. But, war weary like his father, Pavel retreats to a remote forest in the Caucasus, in a vain attempt to escape the increasing tyrannies of the post-war Soviet era. It is there, in that idyllic retreat from the world, that the narrator is born."--BOOK JACKET.