The Matiushin Case is one of the darkest and most powerful works of fiction to appear in Russian in the last twenty years. Deriving, like Captain of the Steppe (And Other Stories, 2013), from the author's own traumatic experience as a conscript in the last years of the Soviet Union, it follows the e[...]
In the vast Kazakh steppes of the crumbling Soviet Empire, Alyosha has finished his army service and is promised a gift from his deaf commander: an eternal tooth. As he waits for it in the infirmary, he agrees to help out a medical officer, and they set out on a journey to the kingdom of the dead. [...]