The latest addition to my website is Eugene Vodolazkin‘s Брисбен (Brisbane). The story is told in alternating chapters, the first telling of the early life of our hero Gleb Yanovsky, till he becomes famous as a musician, and the second from, 2012 when three key events change his life. He is born and bred in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vladimir Sorokin‘s Сердца Четырех (Their Four Hearts). This is the first of apparently eight Sorokin novels that will come out in English translation over the the next couple of years or so. This is the most brutal and transgressive, written by Sorokin as the Soviet Union was breaking … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vladimir Sorokin‘s День опричника (Day of the Oprichnik). This novel is set a few years in the future. Russia now has a Tsar again and, as with Ivan the Terrible, he is protected by an armed force called the Oprichniks. The story tells a day in the life … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ismail Kadare‘s Muzgu i perendive te stepes (Twilight of the Eastern Gods). Kadare spent some time in the 1950s in the Soviet Union, primarily at the Gorky Institute and this is an account of that period. While he loved the big city, it was not all sweetness and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Andrei Bely‘s Симфонии (Symphonies). These are four works – prose poems is the not entirely satisfactory term I would use – written in Bely’s youth, very much under the influence of Symbolism. All were written well before the Russian Revolution and are full of colourful imagery, drawn from … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vladimir Sharov‘s Будьте как дети (Be As Children) . This is the third of Sharov’s novels to be translated into English and, in my view, the best. There are three main stories (and several sub-stories): the story of a noble woman who becomes a a Holy Fool, a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sasha Filipenko‘s Красный крест (Red Crosses). Sasha, a recently widowed young man moves to Minsk, where he buys a flat. He has one neighbour on the same floor – Tatyana Alexeyevna. Though she has Alzheimer’s, she tells him her story. She had worked in the Soviet Union during … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Emilio Fraia‘s Sevastopol (Sevastopol). This consists of three linked stories inspired by Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches, though only one is actually set (in part) in Sevastopol. All three, however, are about people struggling with relationships and struggling to find meaning in their life. The first is about a Brazilian … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maria Stepanova‘s Памяти памяти (In Memory of Memory). This is a superb documentary novel, narrated by the author but written, in some respects, like a novel. She deals with the many aspects of memory, the past and history as well as delving into her own past and the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Corrado Alvaro‘s L’uomo è forte (Man Is Strong; later: Fear in the World). This novel, first published in 1938, tells of an unnamed country which is clearly, to a great extent, the Soviet Union, though neither the country nor any of the cities are named. Both Barbara and … Read more