Fetyukov
Fetyukov is a former office worker who scavenges cigarette ends, begs for scraps, and abandons the codes of dignity valued by the squad.
The book
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeFetyukov is a former office worker who scavenges cigarette ends, begs for scraps, and abandons the codes of dignity valued by the squad. His hunger and isolation make him both pathetic and disliked. He is beaten during the day and cries afterward. The novel does not disclose his long-term fate, but Shukhov fears that his way of surviving may eventually destroy him.
If you like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
If you like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Russian novelist who came to Paris twice in the 1860s, hated it with unusual precision, and wrote the result up as Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, a short, savage account of the French bourgeoisie that stands as the sharpest case ever made against the city by a writer passing through it.
View author
Leo Tolstoy
Russian novelist who wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then renounced the life that produced them. He spent six weeks in Paris in 1857, and on one April morning went to watch a man beheaded in the street — an hour he said destroyed his belief in progress and in the state, and which he was still writing about twenty-two years later.
View author
Mark Twain
The Missouri newspaperman who became America's most famous writer, and whose first book made its reputation partly out of Paris: in 1867 he arrived with a shipload of American tourists, renamed his guide Ferguson, watched the high-kicking can-can through his fingers and wrote it all down. He kept coming back — and was living in Paris in the mid-1890s, broke, while finishing the novel he considered his best, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.
View author