Pokhod na Bar-Khoto
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Hike to Bar-Khoto
Historical novel. AST (Shubina). Moscow 2024. 286 pages.
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Foreign rights: Serbia/ Logos
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Awards: 2024 Yasnaya Polyana Award Winner
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In Leonid Yuzefovich’s latest and again award winning book, he brings history back to life by again empathizing with the mind of a historically authentic figure. These are the fictional but based on real events memoirs of the Russian officer, Captain Solodovnikov, who served as a military adviser in the Mongolian army in 1912–1914, when the Mongols defended their independence from China.
It seems that nobody needs the Bar Khoto fortress. Its future fate, as Solodovnikov‘s
notebooks indicate, is to disappear forever without a trace. So why? Money, power,
vanity - the real reasons for the campaign are obvious. He has to write secretly and
carefully hide his notes, each time for fear of denunciation and searches. Although
his notebooks contain nothing rebellious. However, at that time any private opinion
on historical events was viewed with suspicion. Not only at that time.
The book intertwines the siege of the Chinese-occupied fortress of Bar-Khoto
with love for the wife of a Russian diplomat in Mongolia, the First World War and
Solodovnikov’s deportation from Leningrad to Transbaikalia in the mid-1930s. The
hero rethinks his own life and, with it, the fate of a person in a critical epoch.
