Summary
Olga Slavnikova: 2017
Today, when Olga Slavnikova's 2017 RUSSIAN Booker-winning novel appears in front of the domestic book audience, we read it in real time - as if incredibly contemporary. However, when it was written and originally published a little over ten years ago, it was set in the near future and somewhat dystopian. The world in 2017 - when the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution falls - at least in Russia, where its complex and seductive action takes place, stood on the threshold of the ecological disaster of this new, very unusual revolution - its, we could say, carnivalesque staging. The rough and at the same time dreamy world of the province, the Ural massif immersed in the myths of the magical stone world, but also the stumbling narrative of somewhat more recent industrial progress, is the backdrop for an unusual gallery of characters: stalkers, collectors and illegal traders of mineral wealth and precious stones, local transitional powers, demi-world, and new media and showbiz stars. The basis for everything is an unusual love story with an unexpected outcome, an airy, intangible relationship of unspoken meetings, whose protagonist resembles Cortazar's Maga at first, only to end up as a caricature of a Skorojevic. At the same time, a wave of costumed, bloody riots by some new "Reds" and new "Whites" is spreading across Russia - old hatchets have been dug up, and history, it is quite certain, not only has not ended, but is just beginning again. In many ways, this novel is a representative work of contemporary Russian literature, an offshoot of the cherished epic tradition.
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