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Children of Brezhnev, a novel by Sana Valiulina
Longlisted for the 2017 NOS literary award
Rights sold: Estonia - TANAPAEV, Netherlands - Prometheus, Russia - AST
Children of Brezhnev is a story of love and betrayal set against the backdrop of the economic and spiritual decline of the Soviet Union with its underlying ethnic tensions, the Afghan war and the slow but steady criminalization of the country. The novel culminates in the violent transition to a free market leading to a new Russia where the higher echelons of society and the underworld finally merge.
Children of Brezhnev is an extremely disturbing book which shows with an amazing precision what people are capable of. -- Trouw newspaper...
A rich modern-day novel that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy would also like to have written. -- De Standaard
Children of Brezhnev is a narrative art masterpiece. Valiulina uses traditional literary means to describe a psychologyof her characters, but in her composition she uses her own fancy forms. -- De Volkskrant
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The Goatibex Constellation, a novel by Fazil Iskander (1966)
Published by: Czech Republic - Svet sovetu (1968), Estonia - Perioodika (1967), France - Les Editeurs Francais Reunis (1972), Germany - Volk und Welt (1968), Piper (1973), Verlag der Nation (1984), Hungary - Magveto (1968), Poland - Iskry (1971), Japan - Gunzosha (1985), Italy - Sellerio di Giorgianni (1988), Latvia - Liesma (1968), The Netherlands - Van Oorschot (1980), Slovakia - Obzor (1967), Sweden - AWE/Geber (1977), Romania - Colectia Meridiane (1968), Turkey - Hurriyet (1974), USA - ARDIS (1975), Overlook Press (2015)
Sozvezdie kozlotura (variously translated as "The Goatibex Constellation," "The Constellation of the Goat-Buffalo," and "Constellation of Capritaurus") is written from the point of view of a young newspaperman who returns to his native Abkhazia, joins the staff of a local newspaper, and is caught up in the publicity campaign for a newly produced farm animal, a cross between a goat and a West Caucasian tur (Capra caucasica).
Iskander's "remarkable satire of Lysenko's genetics and Khrushchev's agricultural campaigns, it was harshly criticized for showing the Soviet Union in a bad light." (Karen L. Ryan-Hayes, Contemporary Russian Satire: A Genre Study, Cambridge University Press, 2006).
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