The latest addition to my website is Fyodor Sologub‘s Мелкий бес (The Petty Demon). This is a social satire on the inhabitants of a small Russian town, but focussing on a teacher, Ardalyon Borisych Peredonov. Peredonov is lazy, incompetent, a bully, racist, sexist, petty self-centred and full of himself. He lives with his second cousin, … Read more
The latest addition to my website Yuri Mamleyev‘s Шатуны (The Sublimes). This one of the most unpleasant books I have read for a long time. Mamleyev is clearly aiming to show the dark side of life and deal with issues of mortality and immortality, life and death and the (very) dark side of life under … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Georgi Vladimov‘s Генерал и его армия [The General and His Army]. This is a fictionalised account of the Soviet capture of Kiev from the retreating Nazis in 1943 and the Battle of Moscow in 1941. The eponymous general is General Kobrisov, based on General Chibisov. Vladimov came in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Georgi Vladimov‘s Верный Руслан (Faithful Ruslan). This is a classic of Soviet-era gulag literature though, unlike other gulag novels, such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, it is set in 1956-1957, after Khrushchev released most of those imprisoned under Stalin. Indeed, this novel opens the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zakhar Prilepin‘s Санькя (Sankya). Sankya, invariably called Sasha in this book, is a young Russian, a former military man who belongs to a group called the Founding Fathers, which is opposed to the ruling authorities in Russia, i.e. to Putin, though he is not mentioned by name. Sasha … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ludmila Ulitskaya‘s Даниэль Штайн, переводчик (Daniel Stein, Interpreter). This is a quasi-hagiographic fictionalisation of the story of Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew who, during the war joined the Gestapo to help his fellow Jews escape the Nazis and later joined the Soviet NKVD for similar reasons. During the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Andrei Bitov‘s Преподаватель симметрии (The Symmetry Teacher). This is a wonderful novel, nominally starting with a Russian man trying to reconstruct a story he read some time ago in English (which he does not speak very well), though we do not get to the reconstructed novel till well … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gaito Gazdanov‘s Вечер у Клэр (An Evening with Claire). This was Gazdanov’s first novel, written when he was only twenty-six and living in Paris, after escaping from revolutionary Russia, via Istanbul. The book, which has been called Proustian, is essentially autobiographical, telling the story of Kolya Sosedov, as … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vladislav Otroshenko‘s Приложение к фотоальбому (Addendum to a Photo Album). This a hilarious and somewhat fanciful account of a Cossack family of thirteen brothers, the children of Annushka and (with one exception) Malakh. The one exception is the somewhat blustering Semion, the eleventh son, who is conceived and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vasily Golovanov‘s Остров или Оправдание бессмысленных путешествий [Island or A Justification for Meaningless Travel]. This is a wonderful non-fiction novel, in which the author describes his fascination with and his visits to Kolguyev Island, a remote island off the coast of Northern Russia. Professionally he has worked as … Read more