The Matiushin Case is among the most powerful recent works of Russian fiction. Deriving, like Captain of the Steppe (2013, And Other Stories), from Oleg Pavlov's experience of the declining Soviet Union, it follows Matiushin, a young man damaged by brutality at home and then in the army. Drawing on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "labor-camp writing," Oleg Pavlov builds a unique tension between the horrors of conscription and the dreamlike, timeless mode of his writing. Matiushin's "crime and pun...

Seventeenth century Russia, New Jerusalem Monastery. The recently deposed Patriarch Nikon, whose reforms lead to a schism in the Orthodox church, employs a French dramatist to stage the New Testament and hasten the Second Coming of Christ. Jacques de Sertan’s troupe consists of untrained and illiterate peasants. The actors are divided into roles, whole families play different social or ethnic groups that lived in Jerusalem around the time of Christ. No one, however, is allowed to play the ...

“‘Harry, this is Leonard. I just wanted you to know I watched your film on me and it struck me I never thanked you enough at the time for the magnificent gift you gave with that film. Call me.’Then he left his personal number.” Harry Rasky, April 2000.No other book about Leonard Cohen gets so close to the man, his city, his poems and songs, his friends, his background, and the many original influences that forged this world-famous poet, songwriter and performer as the Song of Leonard Cohen...

The second book in Kilpatrick's Power of the Blood World, NEAR DEATH is the story of the vampire David Lyle Hardwick - a poet who for over a century has lived in the unholy world of the undead, resisting his thirst for blood. Zero, a beautiful, wounded mortal, is sent to destroy him but falls for his seductive power and together they set out in search of his enemies. As their torrid love affair grows, so too does David's unspeakable tormented desire. He is becoming Nosferatu, and when his ...

Deep in the desolate steppe, Captain Khabarov waits out his service at a camp where the news arrives in bundles of last year’s papers and rations turn up rotting in their trucks. The captain hopes for nothing more from life than a meagre pension and a state-owned flat. Until, one Spring, he decides to plant a field of potatoes to feed his half-starved men . . .This blackly comic novel shows the unsettling consequences of thinking for yourself under the Soviet system. Oleg Pavlov’s first no...

In the vast Kazakh steppes of the crumbling Soviet Empire, Alyosha has finished his army service and is promised a gift from his deaf commander: an everlasting steel tooth. As he waits for it in the infirmary, he agrees to help out a medical officer, and they set out on a journey that takes them all the way to the kingdom of the dead. Oleg Pavlov's kaleidoscope of a tale is peopled with soldiers and prisoners, hoboes and refugees and mice that steal medicines. Their surreal inner world is ...

In the chaos of early-1990s Russia, the wife and stepdaughter of a paralyzed veteran conceal the Soviet Union’s collapse from him in order to keep him―and his pension―alive until it turns out the tough old man has other plans. Olga Slavnikova’s The Man Who Couldn’t Die tells the story of how two women try to prolong a life―and the means and meaning of their own lives―by creating a world that doesn’t change, a Soviet Union that never crumbled. After her stepfather’s stroke, Marina hangs Bre...

Late Soviet stagnation, Moscow. Alyosha a writer who suffers from fits accompanied by memory loss admits himself to a psychiatric institute for experimental treatment. Inspired by Ivan the Terrible’s “Memorial Book of the Disgraced” and his own spiritual crisis, Alyosha has been trying to record the memories of people in his life who “died before their time, leaving nothing behind except in my memory”. In hospital, however, he changes tack and decides to dedicate his Memorial Book to the m...