Oblivion
About this audiobook
This masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to examine a very troubled Russia.
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.
About the author
Sergei Lebedev, a poet, essayist, and journalist, is one of Russia’s most lauded young writers. He was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in Asia and northern Russia.
Antonina W. Bouis is one of the leading translators of Russian literature working today. She has translated more than eighty works from authors such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Sakharov, Sergei Dovlatov, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. She was born in West Germany and educated in the United States, where she earned degrees from Barnard College and Columbia University. Bouis, previously executive director of the Soros Foundation in the former USSR, now lives in New York City.
