Oblivion

"A monomaniacal meditation on memory and forgetting, presence and emptiness, Europe and its other . . . While Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov now have the resounding ineffectiveness of classic writers, Lebedev's magnificent novel has the potency to become a mirror and wake-up call to a Russia that is blind to history."—Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"Sergei Lebedev opens up new territory in literature. Lebedev's prose lives from the precise images and the author's colossal gift of observation."—Der Spiegel

"The beauty of the language is almost impossible to bear."—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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. Lebedev is one of Russia's most lauded and exciting young writers.