"A tour de force--exquisite and gripping."--Philippe Sands, author
of East West Street
The Soviet and post-Soviet world, with its untold multitude of crimes,
is a natural breeding ground for ghost stories. No one writes them more
movingly than Russian author Sergei Lebedev, who in this stunning volume
probes a collective guilty conscience marked by otherworldliness and the
denial of misdeeds. These eleven tales share a mystical topography in
which the legacy of totalitarian regimes is ever-present--from Katyn to
Chechnya, from Lithuanian KGB documents to the streetscape of unified
Berlin, from the fragments of family history to the echoes of foot
soldiers in Russia's wars of aggression. In these stories, as in
Lebedev's acclaimed novels, the voices of things, places, animals, and
people seek justice for a restless past, where steel claws scrape just
beneath the surface and where the heredity of evil is uninterrupted,
unacknowledged, unnamed.