Oblivion

One of the first twenty-first century Russian novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system by one of Russia`s finest young writers. A young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbour 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.