First published in 1993 and shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize, Zero Train has enjoyed great success in Russia and in Europe. The Zero Train has the intensity of Dostoevsky and a love affair as touching as that of Doctor Zhivago. The setting is Siding No 9, a remote Soviet railway settlement run by the secret police and serving the so-called Zero Train. The cargo of this sealed 100-wagon train is unknown to the employees of the siding as is the train's provenance; some suspect something sinister and become obsessed by the mystery. The attempted disentanglement of the mystery, which leads to madness and murder, is at the heart of the novel. The train itself forms the basis of a dense web of symbols examining the nature of life lived in the service of an ideal neither known or understood, thus allowing The Zero Train to be read as a study of the ordinary individual under Stalin. The novel begins with Don Domino, an old man, watching a now almost deserted settlement unable to comprehend in his gathering insanity that the track is no longer there and that the Zero Train has stopped passing through. The narrative continues as a series of flashbacks which draw the reader into his life and the mysteries of the Line.

The Zero Train

Literature & Fiction

Buida, Yuri

Literary

Dedalus, Ltd

'One day I found out that my little native town used to be called not Znamensk but Wehlau. Germans had lived here. This had been East Prussia. Then they were deported. A ten-twenty-thirty-year layer of Russian life trembled on a seven-hundred-year foundation about which I knew nothing. So the child began to invent.' The resettling of the Kaliningrad Region (former East Prussia) with Soviet citizens occurred a few years before Yuri Buida's birth in 1954. 'Not a single person was left who could say of East Prussian space and time: "That's me"'. Buida's motley characters - war wounded, bereaved wives, madmen, fearless adolescents and a resurrected minister of state - inhabit a dislocated reality, a dream-like world of double identities and miraculous occurrences. Buida's skill at merging playful fantasy with bitter experience gives to his writing a haunting vividness and intensity. The Prussian Bride is a treasure house of myth and narrative exuberance, with stories that swing between outrageous invention and often tragic reality. It is one of the most exciting discoveries of post-Soviet literature and a worthy winner of a prestigious Apollon Grigoriev award in Russia: it was also shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize.

The Prussian Bride (Dedalus Europe 2002)

Dedalus Limited

"The Zero Train is the most remarkable book I've read this year. It has been hugely successful in Russia, and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker prize. This chilling, brilliant and deeply moving novel goes to the heart of what Stalinism did to individual lives." 
Helen Dunmore in The Observer Books of the Year

Classics

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Books by Buida, Yuri

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Buida, Yuri. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Zero Train

The Prussian Bride (Dedalus Europe 2002)

The Zero Train