Living Souls
by Dmitry Bykov
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Description
In a world a few decades from now, Russia has lost its influence and descended into a farcical civil war. With an extreme right-wing cult in power, racial tensions have divided the country into the Varangians - those who consider themselves to be the original Aryan settlers of Russia - and the Khazars, the liberals and Jews driven out of Moscow by recent events. Morale has reached an all-time low as the brutality and pointlessness of the situation is becoming more and more apparent: what is show more left of the fighting now revolves around capturing and recapturing Degunino, a seemingly magical village with an abundance of pies, vodka and accommodating womenfolk. But there is also a third people - timid, itinerant and on the brink of extinction - who lay claim to Degunino and Russia as their homeland. Against this rich backdrop of events, Living Souls follows the lives of four couples struggling to escape the chaos and stupidity of the war around them: a teenage girl who adopts a homeless man, a poet turned general separated from his lover, a provincial governor in love with one of the natives, and a legendary military commander who is sleeping with the enemy. A wide-ranging work dealing with the ideas of language, power and national identity, Living Souls is a comic and thoughtprovoking novel with tremendous relevance to the present day. show lessTags
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46+ Works 174 Members
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Common Knowledge
- Original title
- ЖД
- Original publication date
- 2006 (Russia) (Russia); 2010 (UK) (UK)
- First words
- Chapter 1
In the Camp of the Russian Warriors
All go unto the same place; all are of dust and all turn to dust again.
Ecclesiastes 3:30
1
By evening Gromov and his unit had recaptured ... (show all)the village of Degunino. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)"Let's go!" she said, and they walked hand in hand to the village of Zhadrunovo.
- Blurbers
- Feinstein, Elaine
- Original language
- Russian
Classifications
- Genres
- General Fiction, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 891.735 — Literature & rhetoric Asian Literature East Indo-European and Celtic literatures Russian and East Slavic languages Russian fiction 1991–
- LCC
- PG3479.4 .Y488 .Z3513 — Language and Literature Slavic languages and literatures. Baltic languages. Albanian language Slavic. Baltic. Albanian Russian literature Individual authors and works 1961-2000
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 47
- Popularity
- 635,036
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.88)
- Languages
- English, Hungarian, Polish, Russian
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 10
