"Opening in stately type and unfolding ever speedier with fierce, extensive attractiveness, this primary novel discloses the load of Soviet historical past and its outcomes. ... hugely suggested for someone fascinated by literature or history."—Library Journal (Starred review)
"Packs a depraved emotional punch via fierce poetic imagery ... Lebedev takes his position beside Solzhenitsyn and different nice writers who've refused to abide through silence ... brave and devastating."—Kirkus Reviews (Starred review)
"An vital booklet approximately the place Russia is this day, with poetic descriptions and unforgettable pictures evoking that nation's usually elusive makes an attempt to appreciate its darkish earlier. I stand in awe of either the writer and translator."—Jack F. Matlock, Jr, former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union
"The subject material of Oblivion is the eerie frozen panorama scattered with the human detritus of an inhuman bygone period. What brings it again from oblivion is the author’s remarkable energy of language. A haunting read."—Michael Zantovsky, former press secretary to Czech President Vaclav Havel, writer of Havel: A Life and previous Czech Ambassador to the us, Israel and Britain
“Beautifully written, haunting and unputdownable. A masterpiece novel which relates the horrors of Russia's unburied Soviet earlier during the eyes of a guy revisiting—and filling within the gaps in—his half-understood childhood.” —Edward Lucas, senior editor, The Economist and writer of The New chilly warfare: Putin's Russia and the possibility to the West
"Sergei Lebedev's debut novel is a haunting story in regards to the lack of nationwide reminiscence and its ethical outcomes for the person. the intense translation through Antonina W. Bouis captures the evocative fantastic thing about the poetic first-person narration and renders it into memorable English."—Solomon Volkov, writer of Shostakovich and Stalin, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, and The Magical refrain: A background of Russian tradition from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn
"An impressive ebook that takes readers throughout Russia's desolate northern panorama and turns up secrets and techniques in regards to the negative legacy of the Soviet gulags, defined via evocative, usually poetic pix of individuals and places."—Celestine Bohlen, International manhattan Times columnist and previous Moscow correspondent for The manhattan Times
"A monomaniacal meditation on reminiscence and forgetting, presence and vacancy ... Lebedev's marvelous novel has the efficiency to develop into a reflect and take-heed call to a Russia that's ignorant of history."—Neue Zürcher Zeitung
"Sergei Lebedev opens up new territory in literature. Lebedev's prose lives from the right pictures and the author's mammoth present of observation."—Der Spiegel
"The fantastic thing about the language is nearly most unlikely to bear."—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
In one of many first twenty-first century Russian novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet criminal camp process, a tender guy travels to the massive wastelands of the a long way North to discover the reality a couple of shadowy neighbor who stored his existence, and whom he understands in simple terms as Grandfather II. What he unearths, one of the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags, is a global relegated to oblivion, the place it truly is more straightforward to disregard either the sufferers and the executioners than to come back to phrases with a bad previous. This nerve-racking story inspires the nice and ruined great thing about a land the place guy and computing device labored in tandem with nature to spoil thousands of lives throughout the Soviet century. rising from brand new Russia, the place the ills of the earlier are being forcefully erased from public reminiscence, this masterful novel represents an epic literary try and rescue heritage from the edge of oblivion.
Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worke