
The Man Who Couldn't Die
The Tale of an Authentic Human Being
by Olga Slavnikova, translated by Marian Schwartz.
Pub Date 29 Jan 2019
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Description
After her stepfather’s stroke, Marina hangs Brezhnev’s portrait on the wall, edits the Pravda articles read to him, and uses her media connections to cobble together entire newscasts of events that never happened. Meanwhile, her mother, Nina Alexandrovna, can barely navigate the bewildering new world outside, especially in comparison to the blunt reality of her uncommunicative husband. As Marina is caught up in a local election campaign that gets out of hand, Nina discovers that her husband is conspiring as well—to kill himself and put an end to the charade. Masterfully translated by Marian Schwartz, The Man Who Couldn’t Die is a darkly playful vision of the lost Soviet past and the madness of the post-Soviet world that uses Russia’s modern history as a backdrop for an inquiry into larger metaphysical questions.
Olga Slavnikova is the author of several award-winning novels, including A Dragonfly Enlarged to the Size of a Dog and 2017, which won the 2006 Russian Booker prize and was translated into English by Marian Schwartz (2010).
Marian Schwartz translates Russian contemporary and classic fiction, including Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and is the principal translator of Nina Berberova.
Advance Praise
"The Man Who Couldn’t Die is an overlooked masterpiece of post-Soviet prose by one of contemporary Russia’s most important authors. It reveals how Slavnikova’s descriptions (and Schwartz’s English equivalent) belong alongside those of Vladimir Nabokov, Iurii Olesha, and Nikolai Gogol as truly revolutionary in Russian prose."
—Benjamin Sutcliffe, Miami University
Available Editions
EDITION | Paperback |
ISBN | 9780231185950 |
PRICE | $14.95 (USD) |