Bøker av Oleg Pavlov

The Matiushin Case is one of the darkest and most powerful works of fiction to appear in Russian in the last twenty years. Deriving from Pavlov's own traumatic experience as a conscript in the Soviet Union, it follows the ordeals of Matiushin, a sensitive, disoriented young man, damaged by brutality first within his family and then the army.

Set in the vast Kazakh steppes of the crumbling Soviet Empire, Oleg Pavlov's kaleidoscope tale is peopled with soldiers and prisoners, hoboes and refugees and mice that steal medicines. Poetic, tragic and darkly comic, the novel is at once a grotesque portrayal of late Soviet reality and an apocalyptic allegory in the vein of Faulkner and Kafka.

Captain Khabarov waits out his service at an isolated camp where the rations turn up already rotten - until one Spring he decides to plant potatoes to feed his starving men. This blackly comic novel - the first by Solzhenitsyn Prize-winner Oleg Pavlov - shows the unsettling consequences of thinking for yourself under the Soviet system.