Description
In this engaging collection of place-based tales, Igor Shchepetkin pushes storytelling into a new 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 a journey 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 a world with the dead. One character recalls a moment from the past when a desperate community gathers together, hoping to save a child from a watery death. Another narrator recalls youthful games played out among nearby gravestones. In these tales, the upheavals of 20th-century wars linger on, casting a long shadow on characters who struggle with life, death, and meaning in the present era. We learn about the battle wounds of a wise grandparent who managed to survive war with his imagination intact. In another story, a boy 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 a world whose devastations haven’t ended. Later, a family friend is reported to the police by his disgruntled ex-wife, setting off a chain reaction that involves searches, confiscations, terminations, and dispersals.
Through a series of stunning juxtapositions involving brutality and beauty, myth and reality, repression and freedom, Shchepetkin creates a moving portrait of communities who experience profound loss and hard-earned epiphanies. The result is an enchanting and original collection of stories that expands our literary and philosophical capacities. Just a warning to readers here—watch out for Little Tickle.
— Susan Kollin, Professor of English, Montana State University—Bozeman, USA
Igor A. Shchepetkin was born in 1962 in Novosibirsk, Russia. In 1985, he graduated from the Tomsk Medical University with a degree in biophysics. From 1985 to 2004, he worked at the Cancer Research Institute in Tomsk, Russia. Since 2004, he has been working as a research scientist at Montana State University – Bozeman, USA.
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…We are told we live in a global world, but we usually don’t know how we are supposed to connect. For example, what do people in Russia think? How about a highly educated Russian who has moved his family to America? Would his writings give us an idea of Russian thoughts and culture? Come along, and you decide! Here are several of his short stories that may help to fill in a few of the blanks, and although they have been published in Russian, English is used in this edition. The stories illustrate some aspects of Russian life during the time period after WWII. You will be intrigued by differences in life style, but you will find human values that we all treasure, and you will be entertained as you read.
As to the author: Think of the courage it took to move a family of five from Russia (actually Siberia) to America and find a new life and new friends. Marvel at the difference between the U.S. and Russia and the positive overlap of common values between individuals. The stories help us to learn a little about Russia through the eyes of a person who has left his home country to find a new home in America and now shares his Russian background…
— Robert W. Ross, Past President, Institute for Learning in Retirement, Baldwin Wallace University, Berea, Ohio, USA
…With an inventive narrative style, Igor Shchepetkin reflects an awareness of craft, telling a story in a fresh, non-linear way, taking the reader to unexpected places by weaving in excerpts and ideological references by Russian Novelists, poetry, songs from a record, remembrances, Greek mythology, and literary allusions, imaginatively addressing themes of coming of age, boyhood imagination and meanderings, workings of the mind, encounters with death, cultural traditions, a Soviet era past, history and experience…
— Corinne Richardson, Writer, Bozeman, MT, USA