Inga Kuznetsova
| Promezhutok | Intervals Novel. AST. Moscow 2019. 351 pages |
In a near-future dystopian version of Russia, which it describes with documentary realism, the state has outlawed poets and poetry in favour of prose, now the only legal form of literature. A special powder is used to destroy poetry books in libraries, poets are killed (and even ritually eaten), and a Nobel Prize-winning poet is secretly kidnapped by government agents. The state declares him officially dead while trying to force him to ghost-write for a certain very powerful person, who dreams of being a famous poet… but lacks the talent.
What neither the president nor the prosaic people suspect, but poetry has always known: In this universe, not only humans are soulful beings gifted with consciousness. Consequently the novel has a multiplicity of narrative perspectives which makes the storytelling truly innovative: pigeons, dogs, trees, platelets in a character’s bloodstream, moss, the bricks in a prison wall, a set of blinds, a crust of bread and even a station platform – animals and objects narrate the poet’s story from their point of view, often intervening or empathizing with the joys and disasters of humans. As the tension between state and poetry builds to a bloody climax, the poet and his followers discover that nothing truly dies…
A cruel anti-utopia, convincingly naturalistic, and hauntingly surreal transforming into a utopia.
• «The Wonderfully Bearable Lightness of Kuznetsova’s Intervals» - review in English by US expert Liza Hayden - READ HERE
