In this engaging collection of place-based tales, Igor Shchepetkin pushes storytelling into anew realm of the real. The author’s mesmerizing prose crosses boundaries and conventions involving the geographical, literary, natural, and supernatural in order to capture the unexpected and unsettling experience of modern life. Drawing inspiration from writers such as Sasha Sokolov, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edgar Allen Poe, Shchepetkin leads readers on ajourney through Soviet and post-Soviet history while exploring the haunted and unknown spaces of the human psyche. These stories remind us how the real is sometimes indistinguishable from the unreal, how politics and history are shot through with fairy tales and dreams, and how the living often share aworld with the dead. One character recalls amoment from the past when adesperate community gathers together, hoping to save achild from awatery death. Another narrator recalls youthful games played out among nearby gravestones. In these tales, the upheavals of 20th-century wars linger on, casting along shadow on characters who struggle with life, death, and meaning in the present era. We learn about the battle wounds of awise grandparent who managed to survive war with his imagination intact. In another story, aboy and his father go berry picking deep in the Russian forest where they unexpectedly encounter barbed wire left from an abandoned prison camp, signs of aworld whose devastations haven’t ended. Later, afamily friend is reported to the police by his disgruntled ex-wife, setting off achain reaction that involves searches, confiscations, terminations, and dispersals.
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