Present Past

A tour de forceexquisite and gripping.Philippe Sands, author ofEast West StreetThe 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, whoin this stunning volume probesa collective guilty conscience marked by otherworldliness and the denial of misdeeds. These eleven tales share a mystical topographyin which the legacy of totalitarian regimes is ever-presentfrom 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 Russias wars of aggression. In these stories, as in Lebedevs 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.