Oblivion Lib/E

Literature & Fiction

Lebedev, Sergei

Literary

Blackstone Publishing

[Translated by Antonina W. Bouis][Read by Daniel Gamburg]An idyllic childhood takes a sinister turn. Rumors of a serial killer haunt the neighborhood, families pack up and leave town without a word of warning, and the country begins to unravel. Policemen stand by as protesters overtake the streets, knowing that the once awe-inspiring symbols of power they wear on their helmets have become devoid of meaning. Lebedev depicts a vast empire coming apart at the seams, transforming a very public moment into something tender and personal, and writes with stunning beauty and shattering insight about childhood and the growing consciousness of a boy in the world.

Year of the Comet

Blackstone Audiobooks

<div class=""> <div class="">Liberties, a Journal of Culture and Politics,&nbsp;is essential reading for those engaged in the cultural and political issues of our time.&nbsp;</div> </div> <div class=""> </div> <div class="">In this issue of&nbsp;Liberties:&nbsp;Michael Ignatieff&nbsp;- The Mind's Emancipation;&nbsp;Mary Gaitskill&nbsp;-&nbsp;The Trials of the Young;&nbsp;Sergei Lebedev&nbsp;- Putin's Philosopher: A Memoir;&nbsp;Michael Walzer&nbsp;- Moral Concern;&nbsp;Justin E. H. Smith&nbsp;- The Happiness Industrial Complex;&nbsp;Andrew Scull&nbsp;- The Fashions in Trauma;&nbsp;David A. Bell&nbsp;- The Triumph of Anti-Politics in America;&nbsp;Michael Kimmage&nbsp;- A Defense of Delight in a Dark Time;&nbsp;Robert Alter&nbsp;- Proust and the Mystification of the Jews;&nbsp;Steven B. Smith&nbsp;- What is a Statesman?;&nbsp;Benjamin Moser&nbsp;- Rembrandt's shadows;&nbsp;Helen Vendler&nbsp;- The Poetry of Charm;&nbsp;Celeste Marcus&nbsp;- Priorism, or the Joshua Katz Affair;&nbsp;Leon Wieseltier&nbsp;- Problems and Struggles; and, new poems by&nbsp;Karen Solie,&nbsp;Adam Zagajewski, and&nbsp;John Hodgen.</div> <div class=""> <div class=""> </div> <div class="">Published quarterly,&nbsp;Liberties,&nbsp;is a collection of the most significant writers today as well as launching the voices of tomorrow.</div> Liberties&nbsp;features serious, independent, stylish, and controversial essays by significant writers and introduces the next generation of writers and poets to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of today's culture and politics.&nbsp;Nobel Prize winners, leading op-ed writers, well-known non-fiction writers, rising talents, and poets from around the world are part of the&nbsp;Liberties&nbsp;series. There's a reason why engaged citizens, cultural warriors, political leaders, opinion makers, and activists from across the cultural and political spectrum read and cherish&nbsp;Liberties. </div>

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics: Volume III, Issue 2

Vendler, Helen

GAITSKILL, Mary

Moser, Benjamin

Bell, David A.

Walzer, Michael

IGNATIEFF, Michael

Alter, Robert

Zagajewski, Adam

Scull, Andrew

Solie, Karen

Smith, Steven B.

Hodgen, John

Smith, Justin E.H.

Bouis, Antonia

Kimmage, Michael C.

Arts & Photography

Liberties Journal

Oblivion

Genre Fiction

Apollo

"Rich in textures, colors, sounds, and visual details ... The best of Russia's younger generation of writers." ―The New York Review of Books
In one of the first twenty-first century Russian novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system, a young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbor who saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds, among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags, is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where man and machine worked in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today's Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to rescue history from the brink of oblivion.
Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. His first novel, Oblivion, has been translated into many languages.

New Vessel Press

"Rich in textures, colors, sounds, and visual details ... The best of Russia's younger generation of writers." ―The New York Review of Books
From the critically acclaimed author of Oblivion comes Year of the Comet, a story of a Russian boyhood and coming of age as the Soviet Union is on the brink of collapse. An idyllic childhood takes a sinister turn. Rumors of a serial killer haunt the neighborhood, families pack up and leave town without a word of warning, and the country begins to unravel. Policemen stand by as protesters overtake the streets, knowing that the once awe-inspiring symbols of power they wear on their helmets have become devoid of meaning. Lebedev depicts a vast empire coming apart at the seams, transforming a very public moment into something tender and personal, and writes with stunning beauty and shattering insight about childhood and the growing consciousness of a boy in the world.
Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in Russia and Central Asia. Lebedev is a poet, essayist and journalist. Oblivion, his first novel, was published in 2016 by New Vessel Press, to great acclaim.

The Year of the Comet

"Outstanding." ―The Wall Street Journal
“Lebedev’s characters seek ways to cut the umbilical cord with the past.” ―Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
This revelatory novel shows why Karl Ove Knausgaard has likened its celebrated Russian author to an "indomitable ... animal that won't let go of something when it gets its teeth into it." The book tells the story of a young Russian named Kirill, the sole survivor of a once numerous clan of German origin, who delves relentlessly into the unresolved past. His ancestor, Balthasar Schwerdt, migrated to the Russian Empire in the early 1800s, bringing with him the practice of alternative medicine and becoming captive to an erratic nobleman who had supplied dwarves, hunchbacks from Africa, and magicians to entertain Catherine the Great. Kirill’s investigation takes us through centuries of turmoil during which none of the German’s nine children or their descendants can escape their adoptive country’s cruel fate. Intent on uncovering buried mysteries, Kirill searches archives and cemeteries across Europe, while pressing witnesses for keys to understanding. The Goose Fritz illuminates both personal and political history in a passion-filled family saga about an often confounding country that has long fascinated the world.

The Goose Fritz

"A thriller dipped in poison ... Shares some of le Carré's fascination with secret worlds and the nature of evil." --The New York Times The terrifying, lengthening list of Russia's use of lethal poisons against its critics has inspired acclaimed author Sergei Lebedev's latest novel. With uncanny timing, he examines how and why Russia and the Soviet Union have developed horrendous neurotoxins. At its center is a ruthless chemist named Professor Kalitin, obsessed with developing an absolutely deadly, undetectable and untraceable poison for which there is no antidote. But Kalitin becomes consumed by guilt over countless deaths from his Faustian pact to create the ultimate venom. When the Soviet Union collapses, the chemist defects and is given a new identity in Western Europe. After another Russian is murdered with Kalitin's poison, his cover is blown and he's drawn into an investigation of the death by Western agents. Two special forces killers are sent to silence him--using his own undetectable poison. In this fast-paced, genre-bending tale, Lebedev weaves suspenseful pages of stunningly beautiful prose exploring the historical trajectories of evil. From Nazi labs, Stalinist plots and the Chechen Wars, to present-day Russia, Lebedev probes the ethical responsibilities of scientists supplying modern tyrants and autocrats with ever newer instruments of retribution, destruction and control.

Untraceable

"A tour de force—exquisite and gripping."—Philippe Sands, author of East West Street 
The Soviet and post-Soviet world, with its untold multitude of crimes, is a natural breeding ground for ghost stories. No one writes them more movingly than Russian author Sergei Lebedev, who in this stunning volume probes a collective guilty conscience marked by otherworldliness and the denial of misdeeds. These eleven tales share a mystical topography in which the legacy of totalitarian regimes is ever-present—from Katyn to Chechnya, from Lithuanian KGB documents to the streetscape of unified Berlin, from the fragments of family history to the echoes of foot soldiers in Russia’s wars of aggression. In these stories, as in Lebedev’s acclaimed novels, the voices of things, places, animals, and people seek justice for a restless past, where steel claws scrape just beneath the surface and where the heredity of evil is uninterrupted, unacknowledged, unnamed.

A Present Past: Titan and Other Chronicles

The Lady of the Mine

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Books by Lebedev, Sergei