Sublime

l’écouter. Il s’exprimait de façon simple et imagée, avec l’autorité de celui qui sait qu’on ne l’interrompra pas et une prédilection pour les mots « magnifique » et « monstrueux ». Tout était soit magnifique soit monstrueux, il ne connaissait rien entre les deux, et Zakhar, la première fois qu’il l’a vu, a pensé : « C’est un être magnifique, capab

I wondered how Mom was doing. She always said drying out was the worst hell imaginable, and I felt sorry for that. Not now. Tell me about hell, I told her in my mind. All you had to do today is your moral goddamn inventory and a lot of lying around. On nice clean sheets.

Varlam Shalamov was sentenced in 1937 to years of hard labor in a Soviet gulag. What were his crimes? The same crimes that brought most people to those frozen hellholes: Falling on the wrong side of a totalitarian regime. Random bad luck. Daring to criticize the powers that be. For not being communist enough. For not confessing, though that hardly

The date was January 28, 1945. I WOKE UP AT DAWN on January 29. On my father’s cot there lay another sick person. They must have taken him away before daybreak and taken him to the crematorium. Perhaps he was still breathing … No prayers were said over his tomb. No candle lit in his memory. His last word had been my name. He had called out to me an

Zakhar Prilepine est un type formidable. Honnête, courageux, tolérant, le genre qui regarde la vie comme il vous regarde, droit dans les yeux, et pas pour affronter mais pour comprendre, autant que possible aimer. Le contraire de la brute fasciste, le contraire aussi du dandy décadent qui trouve sexy l’imagerie nazie ou stalinienne. Dans ses livres