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Product Description
Winner of the first Russian Booker Prize, Lines of Fate is an unexpected and extraordinary philosophical mystery novel populated with artists, criminals, and drug addicts. Lines of Fate is also a profound meditation on Russia's past and the crippling effects of Soviet power on the Russian psyche.
Amazon.com Review
It is poetically ironic that Mark Kharitonov's story of a manuscript retrieved from the "dustbin of history," completed in 1985, could be published only after the collapse of the system it chronicles. Once Soviet communism fell in 1989 Kharitonov moved from obscurity to fame, lionized as the new master of Russian post-modernism. This novel tells how Lizavin, a small-town scholar, tries to assemble and save the writings of a provincial philosopher, Milashevich, whose manuscript is written on scattered "fantiki," or candy wrappers. Kharitonov addresses the big question of individual responsibility for history, but as suggested by his local heroes, he eschews big answers, and locates meaning in the everyday patterns of small-town life. Like Lizavin, Kharitonov himself gives voice to the dead and voiceless.
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