SECTION TEN
sm
COLUMN
NINETY-FIVE, AUGUST
1, 2003
(Copyright © 2003 The Blacklisted Journalist)
BOOK REVIEWS
(Copyright
2003 Joyce Metzger)
DEVIL'S
MIDNIGHT, A TALE
OF
SUSPENSE
AND ROMANCE
IN THE RUSSIAN
CIVIL
WAR
by Yuri Kapralov
Akashic Books, POB 1456, New York, NY 10009
First Printing 2003
Yuri Kapralov was born in the Caucasus and came to the
U.S. in 1949. He has lived in the East Village, NYC, since 1965. "I didn't want to come to
America. I was basically in the wrong place at the wrong time," says the author. Born in
Stavropol, Kapralov spent the latter half of WWII laboring on a German farm---"One step above a
concentration camp," he recalls. In 1949, he was shipped to New York. While there, he and the other
"orphaned" youth were taken to work on a Vermont farm. "The farmer was basically exploiting us, so
we staged a little revolution and went to Nyack where we lived in an abandoned zoo," he recalls.
"I lived in the house of the white elephant."
Yuri has exhibited his visual art in New York and San Francisco, and he is the author of
Castle Dubrava (Dutton, 1982), a vampire novel, and Once There Was A
Village (Akashic Books, 1998), a memoir of his experiences in the East Village in the
late 1960s.
Devil's Midnight, A Tale of Suspense and Romance in the Russian Civil War has a definite thematic
intensity as Yuri Kapralov re-interprets events and circumstances, to reshape, reconstruct and redefine
intriguing plot deviations of abstract ideology with the fine hair tendrils of historic significance.
Kiev under the Bolsheviks and the Whites. The Great Red Offensive and the battles involving the
armored train "Our Homeland" along the Kursk-Zhigri railway line. The last days and the fall of Odessa
and many other events are depicted by Yuri Kapralov in this steadily page-turner novel.
The Red Army is making its final triumphant surge across the tortured remains of the old Russian Empire
between August 1919-February 1920. It is a time of horror, of disruption, and apocalypse, as lives are
pulled between narrow escapes, desperate intimacy, an aura of surreality, paranoiac anxiety, urgency
and brutality.
Kapralov depicts, with sometimes cynical and satirical style, the desperate struggles of his characters, a
woe-be-gone cast of misfits molded by a merciless fate. The upsweep of
'Mad' locomotives were very old, still-working machines, rigged with explosives. . .'
mindlessness moves outside
the normal societal framework. One is with the winning side, or they are not; and if not, they are brutally
captured and tortured. Alexey Lebedev struggles to remain sane, and alive. Beautiful Nata Tai, "the
bewitching witch," born of a highly strung Russian actress mother and an American father, uses sex to
keep herself alive, but is fanatically committed to the mysteriously seductive occult. Alexey is attracted
to her danger, but walks the borderline between love, commitment and the sanity that has disappeared.
"'Mad' locomotives were very old, still-working machines, rigged with explosives, pyroxene barrels,
dynamite, land and sea mines, and powder, with a detonating device triggered by several bottles of
nitroglycerine. This was a hell machine, and once the steam had built up and the mad locomotive was
released at high speed toward the enemy's armored train, it was nearly impossible to stop it. The result:
one gigantic explosion. The whole train might as well become a fireball. But orders were orders."
"There was no roof except for a few charred beams, no glass in the huge windows. On both sides of the
long brick walls bodies were stacked up five or six high, like piles of firewood. Many were naked. All
were frozen. Yuri saw that the bodies of White soldiers lay on one side, while the bodies of refugees,
women and children lay on the other. The White soldiers and officers had been tortured and mutilated
before being shot. The tortures were: the "iron glove" fitting treatment, the "tree cutting," the
"emasculation," and some of the more common atrocities, such as cutting strips of skin off the soldiers' shoulders
where their patches had been and carving red stars on their foreheads."
"Who are you fighting for, colonel? For the millions who were killed already, for the millions who will die
this winter alone? For the braggart prince and his palace in the Crimea?"
"Death. is it really the end? Everyone must die. I am not an exception. Will the Almighty take pity on my
soul? And is there one Almighty or two? if so, which one has jurisdiction over my soul? And the current
life, the insanity? I am insane. Insane beyond the help of any psychiatrists, any priests. True to my
madness."
Devil's Midnight by Yuri Kapralov is a monumental tale of love, art, exile, and the horrors of war, as a
country divided, falls upon one another to ravage, pillage, tear savagely and destroy. At the heart of this
chorus of voices and blinding historical spectacle stands the consciousness, fluid prose, storytelling skill
and memory of the author. Yuri has been alienated from his homeland, but his acute memory will never
allow the bizarre past to pass unnoticed. Yuri cannot hide that large hollowness buried deep inside. His
anxiety ridden angst intensifies the painful isolation and solitariness. The burdens lain on the spirit must
be released.
This book is excellently written. One word of warning for the squeamish...there are brutal scenes, vividly
depicted, with the known horrors of brutal war, and many revealed, that I had not contemplated, before
reading Devil's Midnight.
Akashic Books has won a reputation for publishing works that would go unnoticed by the larger presses.
They are valiant in this effort for realism. Many authors have, and are, gaining a wider recognition
through this compassionate support. ##
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