Best friends Eva and Nika haven't seen or spoken for ten years, but now they're finally reunited—and forced to immediately go on the run. On the long journey from Rostov-on-Don to Vladivostok, they'll have to face FSB agents, gangsters, inclement weather, disease, hunger, and—most terrifying of all—their own past.

His new book, ‘The Dark Side of the Earth,’ is a deeply personal reconstruction of the last thirty years of the Soviet Union, chronicling its journey from the dawn of the space age, the peak of the Soviet empire, to stagnation, and then to perestroika, a series of crises, and collapse. It's also a book about the people, contemporaries, and participants in those events. Among them are Mikhail...

Konstantin Gaaze's book, ‘Where Dictatorships Are Drifting,’ chronicles the historical evolution of Russian autocracy, culminating in a full-scale invasion of a neighboring country. In pondering why Russia attacked Ukraine, the author dismisses two well-worn theories—the country's eternal historical fate and the sinister personality of its ruler. Instead, he presents the results of his...

‘50’ is a book by Meduza film critic Anton Dolin, published to mark the author's anniversary. The collection includes 50 texts written between 2001 and 2022 for the magazine Iskusstvo Kino (only one article, on Paul Thomas Anderson's ‘Battle After Battle,’ was written specifically for the book). Dolin began his professional career writing for IK, and in 2017, he became head of the editorial...

Experiencing unrequited love, the heroine of Daria Traiden's novel buys a village house in Belarus and begins renovating it. Transforming and inhabiting her own space on her native land is her strategy for preserving meaning. Reflecting on body, identity, poverty, violence, and family, the author searches for and reinvents her roots. Equally about love and home, the book explores the...

Andrey Dudko's novel is a psychedelic parody of autofiction. The protagonist, a fake alter ego of the writer, abandons his family and job and retreats to the provincial town of Slonim to create a literary masterpiece in the solitude of his empty family home. However, alcohol, casual sex, and the phantoms of his childhood haunting the city hinder his creativity. Instead of writing, the...

Reading these poems and looking at these photographs, it feels like you've seen it all somewhere else. A small town no one dreams of visiting, with a train station and a bus stop. A fellow traveler with a bag of London bags packed by his wife. An apartment rental ad: a TV always by the window, a sofa, two armchairs against the wall. Little things that never seem important, but only they can...

The third volume is devoted to the first period of Nicholas Pavlovich's reign. The nature of ‘Knight Nicholas,’ as he was called in childhood, the ‘Don Quixote of autocracy,’ as he was later called, was infused with the absolute conservatism of his mentors, the historian Nikolai Karamzin and General Matthias Lambsdorff: the individual is insignificant, the state is valuable in itself. An...

‘The Biggest Ferris Wheel’ is a novel-autofiction in which real life, resembling fiction, blends with fantasy, resembling life. Simple and bright stories from life, brief love affairs that never developed into anything more, the painful experience of war, encounters with people identified by initials of varying degrees of obviousness—this motley narrative is brought together in touching...

The book ‘Deal with the Devil: German-Russian Relations between the First and Second World Wars’ is a compact and extremely engaging presentation of the history of the Russian and German peoples, filled with events of historic proportions. With captivating dynamism and literary precision, Sebastian Hafner describes the twists and turns in relations between nations that sometimes fought each...

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is someone who knows how to work with chaos. She's known it since her hungry childhood during the war. Today, the girl who sang in the courtyards of Kuibyshev for bread is a celebrated writer, and people call her ‘great.’ But today, Petrushevskaya says, ‘There Is No Time.’ That's the title she gave to her book, which she's long wanted to compile from the texts of an...