The latest addition to my website is Anna Lidia Vega Serova‘s Ánima fatua (Anima fatua). This is an autobiographical novel about a woman born in Leningrad to a Cuban father and Russian mother. They emigrate to Cuba but the parents divorce and mother, daughter and son return to Russia where things do not go well. … Read more
The latest addition to my website isAlexei Ivanov‘s Пищеблок The Food Block). The novel is set in 1980 in a remote Soviet pioneer camp on the Volga. Our two heroes are Igor Korzukhin, a team leader, and Valerka, a young pioneer. The pioneers indulge in various activities but first Valerka Lagunov and then Igor discover … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergei Lebedev‘s Белая дама (Lady of the Mine). The novel is set in the Donbas region of Ukraine in July 2014. The Russians have annexed Crimea and are causing serious disruption in Donbas. During the book they will shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.The town we are concerned … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ghazaleh Alizadeh‘s خانه ادریسیها (The House of The Edrisis (Volume 1). The novel is set in what we know as Ashgabat, capital of Turkmenistan, but it had been part of Persia and is now (1910s) part of Russia. The Edrisis are a decaying family living in a large … Read more
The latest addition to my website is German Sadulaev‘s Я — чеченец! (I am a Chechen!). As the title tells us, this book is written by a Chechen. A lot of the book focusses on the Chechen wars with Russia, though our hero did not participate too much in them, not least because he was … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Guzel Yakhina‘s Дети мои (A Volga Tale). The focus is on the Volga Germans, German nationals who, at the invitation of Catherine the Great (herself German) emigrated to Russia in the late eighteenth century and settled alongside the River Volga. Catherine the Great referred to them as my … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ismail Kadare‘s Kur sunduesit grinden (A Dictator Calls). Kadare had spent some time studying in Moscow where he heard the story about the call Stalin made to Boris Pasternak in 1934 about fellow poet Osip Mandelstam. Mandelstam had been arrested (for writing poems critical of Stalin)and Stalin asked … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eugene Vodolazkin‘s Оправдание Острова (A History of the Island). This is the history of an imaginary island, told both in a series of sometimes contradictory chronicles as well as with commentary by the 347 (sic) year old former royal couple. The story takes us from the early days … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lyudmila Petrushevskaya‘s Нас украли. История преступлений (Kidnapped). Petrushevskaya is best-known for her weird/dark tales and though this is a novel it takes the form of several tales within tales within tales… We start with a man, Sergei Sertsov, who made his fortune (illegally) after the fall of his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergei Lebedev‘s Титан (A Present Past: Titan and Other Chronicles). This is not a novel but, as Lebedev says in his introduction, the stories are based on his and others’ reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union and share a mystical topography in which the legacy of … Read more