IN THE VILLAGE OF MERRY LIMP, Aunt Zina runs a butcher shop. On Sinew Monday, only sinews are sold. On Bone Tuesday, the populace can buy bones; and so on for the rest of the week. Thus Marina Sonkina lays the groundwork for a surreal satire on Stalin's USSR. Seen through the eyes of the eleven-year-old Natasha, the story unfolds in a mad procession of events, incongruous characters, party meetings and slogans. We encounter railway workers, officials and party leaders all the way to characters like Beria and Stalin himself. Audaciously using grotesque as her method of description, Sonkina resurrects the fears, the cruelty and the absurdity of people's lives under Stalin.  As all good satire, "Comrade Stalin's Baby Tooth" puts a reflective mirror to the past, warning us about the future.   The book, illustrated with colour propaganda posters of the period, is presented in the manner of an official document from the KGB files. "What readers could forget their introduction to Merry Limp Cemetery, or a chess game at Lenin's tomb involving live pawns wearing crimson tutus? The wit, satire, imagination, and empathy of Comrade Stalin's Baby Tooth, not to mention all the playful narrative surprises and memorable imagery, convey the human capacity (in Faulkner's words) not only to endure but to prevail. To make poetry and comedy out of waste and horror is doubtless difficult, but Marina Sonkina admirably manages both." - Elise Partridge, author of Chameleon Hours

COMRADE STALIN'S BABY TOOTH

Comics & Graphic Novels

Sonkina, Marina

Graphic Novels

MW Books Publishing

The resistance of the human spirit in face of time, disloyalty, and oblivion is the theme of Marina Sonkina’s new collection of short stories. Her seemingly naïve and helpless protagonists inhabit disparate social stations, geographical locales and cultures; all are persons displaced in their own lives. But in their struggles for survival, they discover the redeeming and dangerous power of unconditional love – the only weapon available to them. Strange and incomprehensible to everyone, love makes its sudden appearance to an eight-year-old hunchbacked boy in the title story of Lucia’s Eyes. As he brings the gifts of his artistic imagination to Lucia, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, the bleak and cruel reality of Stalin’s Russia dissolves into magic … In “Runic Alphabet” a Polish-Canadian painter plants a tree that brings to life memories of a woman long dead who remains the only true love of his life. In “Carmelita” an aging man from Winnipeg, vacationing in Mexico, falls in love with a young Mexican painter. In “Christmas Tango” a jobless drifter in snowy Montreal discovers tango, inadvertently transforming his own life and the lives of those who come in contact with him. In “Tractorina” a hard-working crane-operator, retired in post-Gorbachev Russia, is driven into a rose-tinted abyss by her stepson. In “Angels Ascending and Descending” a young girl is initiated into the mysterious  symbolism of Russian Orthodox church architecture by a priestly man who hardly lives up to the spiritual heights he preaches. Full of unexpected turns and twists, sadness, joy and humour, these stories reflect life, itself always a surprise, and always a miracle.

Lucia's Eyes & Other Stories (Prose Series)

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Guernica Editions

Expulsion & Other Stories (112) (Essential Prose Series)

Contemporary

At the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, Canadian author Marina Sonkina flew to the Ukrainian-Polish border to volunteer in a refugee camp using her knowledge of Russian and some Ukrainian. The suffering on a massive scale was beyond what she could possibly expect. "Putin's destruction of Ukraine left me with dismay and utter helplessness. The world order as we knew it, after WWII, was unraveling in Europe in front of my eyes, and I could do nothing about it. Evil always shouts loud; goodness is quiet. But when I came as a volunteer to a transition refugees centre at the Polish-Ukrainian border, I saw an outpour of good will on an unprecedented scale. This book is a celebration of magnanimity that lives in the heart of each of us and comes forth when called upon. It is also a homage to the millions of destitute Ukrainian women, faced with the daunting task of rebuilding their lives and the lives of their children with patient courage, moral grace, and faith in the ultimate victory of goodness over evil."

Ukrainian Portraits: Diaries from the Border (214) (Essential Prose Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

One Thousand and A Night as Told by Larissa, Construction Shock-Worker is both a comic and tragic saga of a Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish family, headed by an irreverent, no-nonsense eighty-year-old Larissa, whose vitality and life-affirming wit overcomes all the hurdles thrown her way by the Soviet regime. Both lighthearted and tragic, this tale of suffering and love takes us to Ukraine, central Russia, Siberia, Montenegro and Canada. The "silent generations" of the Soviet history speak through the voice of a woman who is trying to come to terms with the dramatic past of her two countries--Russia and Ukraine--as well as her own family history.

One Thousand and A Night as Told by Larissa, Construction Shock-Worker

Genre Fiction

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Books by Sonkina, Marina