‘Count T. heads towards a mysterious area called ‘Optina Pustyn’. Bypassing all sorts of obstacles, he is steadily approaching the goal, however, seeing neither the meaning nor the reasons for his dangerous journey. However, soon he will have to doubt not only the illusory nature his mission, but also in his own reality, and at the same time in the reality of the entire surrounding world. Count...

Victor Erofeev (born in 1947) is a Russian writer, literary critic, TV and radio presenter. His novel 'Russian Beauty' was written in the early 1980s, but was published only in 1989, because it turned out to be too frank for the then Soviet society. But even later, in the era of perestroika, the book caused a storm of indignation and sharp criticism: telling the story of the provincial Irina...

Strange things are afoot in the cosmopolitan city of Lviv, western Ukraine. Seagulls are circling and the air smells salty, though Lviv is a long way from the sea.

It tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a mid-teenager in 1958 had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a personal secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past—a...

Moscow, 2028. A scream, a moan, and a death rattle slowly pull Andrei Danilovich Komiaga out of his drunken stupor. But wait, that's just his ring tone. So begins another day in the life of an oprichnik, one of the czar's most trusted courtiers, and one of the country's most feared men.

The sugary, white Kremlin is the heart of Russia in the 2020s, which survived the Red, Gray and White Troubles, closed off from the outside world and plunged into sleep. its refined copy, but in fact it does not belong to anyone. Fifteen short stories from the collection 'Sugar Kremlin', written as if in completely different ways and about different things, add up to a picture of a ghostly,...

'Fighter' is a novel about Soviet pilots, 'Stalin's falcons'. They crossed the North Pole, tormented the air paths to America. Their life is a metaphor for overcoming in the name of a higher goal, the trust of the people and the leader. Dmitry Bykov tried to look beyond ideology, to understand what kind of power ruled Soviet history. The word 'exterminator' in the novel is ambiguous. In the...

Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their f