Mikhail Shishkin,Marian Schwartz
Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peterâ€”the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradiseâ€”and tell of the atrocities theyâ€™ve suffered, or that theyâ€™ve invented, or heard from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle with the interpreterâ€™s own reading: a hisÂ­tory of an ancient Persian war; letters sent to his son â€œNebuchadnezzasaurus,â€ ruler of a distant, imaginary childhood empire; and the diaries of a Russian singer who lived through Russiaâ€™s wars and revolutions in the early part of the twentieth century, and eventually saw the Soviet Unionâ€™s dissolution. ,Mikhail Shishkinâ€™s Maidenhair is an instant classic of Russian literature. It bravely takes on the eternal questionsâ€”of truth and fiction, of time and timelessÂ­ness, of love and war, of Death and the Wordâ€”and is a movingly luminescent expression of the pain of life and its uncountable joys.
Fiction,Cultural,Russia,Literature,Russian Literature,Contemporary,Literature,Literature,21st Century,Novels,War,Modern,Literary Fiction
Maidenhair