Overview
Winner of the Russian Booker Prize, a sensational novel of Russia set exactly 100 years after the revolution
In the year 2017 in Russia-exactly 100 years after the revolution-poets and writers are obsolete, class distinctions are painfully sharp, and spirits intervene in the lives of humans from their home high in the mythical Riphean Mountains.
Professor Anfilogov, a wealthy and emotionless man, sets out on an expedition to unearth priceless rubies that no one else has been able to locate. Young Krylov, a talented gem cutter who Anfilogov had taken under his wing, is seeing off his mentor at the train station when he is drawn to a mysterious stranger who calls herself Tanya. A scandalous affair ensues, but trouble arises in the shape of Krylov's ex-wife Tamara and a spy who appears at the lovers' every rendezvous. As events unfold, Krylov begins to learn more than he bargained for about the women in his life and realizes why he recognizes the spy from somewhere deep within his past. Meanwhile, Anfilogov's expedition reveals ugly truths about man's disregard for nature and the disasters stemming from insatiable greed.
Olga Slavnikova stuns with this engaging and remarkable tale of love, obsession, murder, and the lengths people will go to get what they want.
Synopsis
Winner of the Russian Booker Prize, a sensational novel of Russia set exactly 100 years after the revolution
In the year 2017 in Russia-exactly 100 years after the revolution-poets and writers are obsolete, class distinctions are painfully sharp, and spirits intervene in the lives of humans from their home high in the mythical Riphean Mountains.
Professor Anfilogov, a wealthy and emotionless man, sets out on an expedition to unearth priceless rubies that no one else has been able to locate. Young Krylov, a talented gem cutter who Anfilogov had taken under his wing, is seeing off his mentor at the train station when he is drawn to a mysterious stranger who calls herself Tanya. A scandalous affair ensues, but trouble arises in the shape of Krylov's ex-wife Tamara and a spy who appears at the lovers' every rendezvous. As events unfold, Krylov begins to learn more than he bargained for about the women in his life and realizes why he recognizes the spy from somewhere deep within his past. Meanwhile, Anfilogov's expedition reveals ugly truths about man's disregard for nature and the disasters stemming from insatiable greed.
Olga Slavnikova stuns with this engaging and remarkable tale of love, obsession, murder, and the lengths people will go to get what they want.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Olga Slavnikova's profound new novel 2017 evokes, with uncanny vividness, a Russia of the near-future in which a character reasonably wonders "how much about human beings is human?" One hundred years after the Bolshevik revolution, the masses enslaved by electronic entertainment and cyber-wizadry now inhabit roles rather than lives. Or so it seems to Krylov and his ex-wife, Tamara who deliver the Novel's darker existential pronouncements. Readers, thankfully, are allowed a more thrilling view as they follow characters that, despite their shabbily futuristic environment, are as human as any found in Tolstoy or Chekhov.
"For months he had lived with an incomprehensible hunger," Slavnikova writes of the yearning Krylov, a gifted gem-cutter who begins an obsessive affair with a woman he meets on a railway platform as the gem-hunting expedition of shady Professor Anfilogov departs for the Riphean mountains. Krylov is the professor's most gifted protege, but who is this "Tanya"?
As Krylov's obsession intensifies, the novel simultaneously follows the Anfilogov expedition into a wilderness alive with myth and danger. "In the light of the barbed stars the untrodden snow was like a televisions screen flickering on an empty channel," Slavnikova writes, "the northern lights flickered in the sky like a flame from burning alcohol." In the city, the moon shines overhead "like an elevator button" and when a 1917 anniversary parade turns bloody, federal helicopters swoop down "like sledgehammers with dragonfly wings ." Descriptions such as these, along with Slavnikova's flawless portraits -- of a gigolo TV celebrity, for instance, or a fatalistic peasant -- transport the reader to an alien yet weirdly recognizable world, one that remains, for all Krylov's doubts, only too human.
--Anna MundowEditorials
Publishers Weekly
Set a century after the Russian Revolution, this satirical political thriller, which won “the Russian Booker Prize” in 2006, follows the less than engaging adventures of a Russian gem cutter named Krylov and the consequences of his affair with a virtual stranger. Heavy-handed parody undercuts Slavnikona’s attempt to sound a warning about the future direction of Russia. For example, a few months after the U.S. president, Pamela Armstrong, perishes in a terrorist attack in Beirut, Armstrong’s image appears on a new $600 bill, and her biography, “which was published with lightning speed in every language,” emphasizes her having adopted “eighteen orphans of every existing skin color, from a Yakut as yellow as melted grease to a blue-black girl from Ghana.” Fantasy elements, like the disappearances related to a mountain spirit known as the Stone Maiden, may remind some of The Master and Margarita, but American readers should be prepared for a futuristic fable that falls far short of Bulgakov’s masterpiece. (Mar.)The Barnes & Noble Review
Olga Slavnikova's profound new novel 2017 evokes, with uncanny vividness, a Russia of the near-future in which a character reasonably wonders "how much about human beings is human?" One hundred years after the Bolshevik revolution, the masses enslaved by electronic entertainment and cyber-wizadry now inhabit roles rather than lives. Or so it seems to Krylov and his ex-wife, Tamara who deliver the Novel's darker existential pronouncements. Readers, thankfully, are allowed a more thrilling view as they follow characters that, despite their shabbily futuristic environment, are as human as any found in Tolstoy or Chekhov.
"For months he had lived with an incomprehensible hunger," Slavnikova writes of the yearning Krylov, a gifted gem-cutter who begins an obsessive affair with a woman he meets on a railway platform as the gem-hunting expedition of shady Professor Anfilogov departs for the Riphean mountains. Krylov is the professor's most gifted protege, but who is this "Tanya"?
As Krylov's obsession intensifies, the novel simultaneously follows the Anfilogov expedition into a wilderness alive with myth and danger. "In the light of the barbed stars the untrodden snow was like a televisions screen flickering on an empty channel," Slavnikova writes, "the northern lights flickered in the sky like a flame from burning alcohol." In the city, the moon shines overhead "like an elevator button" and when a 1917 anniversary parade turns bloody, federal helicopters swoop down "like sledgehammers with dragonfly wings...." Descriptions such as these, along with Slavnikova's flawless portraits -- of a gigolo TV celebrity, for instance, or a fatalistic peasant -- transport the reader to an alien yet weirdly recognizable world, one that remains, for all Krylov's doubts, only too human.
--Anna Mundow