A Present Past: Titan and Other Chronicles

Sergei Lebedev

apr 2023 · New Vessel Press

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"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.

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Sergei Lebedev has been called the most important younger Russian author writing today. His novels have been translated into many languages and four of his works—Untraceable, Oblivion, The Year of the Comet, and The Goose Fritz—have been published in English by New Vessel Press to great acclaim.

Antonina W. Bouis is one of the leading translators of Russian literature now at work. She has translated over eighty works from authors such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrei Sakharov. Bouis, previously executive director of the Soros Foundation in the former USSR, now lives in New York City.