"Rich in textures, colors, sounds, and visual details ... The best of
Russia's younger generation of writers."--The New York Review of
Books
In one of the first twenty-first century Russian novels to probe the
legacy of the Soviet prison camp system, a young man travels to the vast
wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy
neighbor who saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II.
What he finds, among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former
gulags, is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore
both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a
terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty
of a land where man and machine worked in tandem with nature to destroy
millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today's
Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from
public memory, this masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt
to rescue history from the brink of oblivion.
Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years
on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. His first
novel, Oblivion, has been translated into many languages.
