On the Way to Red Square

On the Way to Red Square is a compelling collection of short stories set in Soviet Moscow in the 1980's. Julieta Rodrigues meshes fictional personal subject matter with social and political issues to produce a moving and thought-provoking book. "On the Way to Red Square exceeds the boundaries it has created for itself: between the private and the political, the everyday and the theatrical, love and alienation, informers and their victims, life and death, joy and sadness, Russians and foreigners, 'us' versus 'them.' The ineffable language of pain and inquisitive openness and the resulting vision of the stern Soviet Moscow is hauntingly revealing, at the same time the distant and the close glance that Victor Shklovsky aptly defines." -Olga Meerson, Professor of Russian, Georgetown University "Julieta Rodrigues has neatly captured the gray, gritty, every-day essence of life in the Soviet Union that I saw in the early 1980's. From the snowy and dismal streets to the bathhouses and garish hotels, she has preserved lost fragments of communist Moscow in her amber stories." - Jon Purnell, Tashkent, Uzbekistan "In a book as teeming with characters as a 19th century Russian novel, but entirely modern in its concerns, we accompany Laura, narrator and protagonist, through gripping and candid stories: the angry young man in 'Caged,' living in a cramped collective where people must line up to use the toilet; the disappointed, power-abusing official, Lyudmila, in 'Glass Silhouettes,' obsessed with her collection of glass miniatures; and, in the last story, 'New Year's Eve at the Praga,' an enigmatic blonde dancing alone, as intriguing and ambiguous to the little band of Americans as is Moscow itself. Rodrigues reminds me of Chekhov. - Robbie Murphy, Best American Short Stories (under the name of Roberta Gupta)