Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Oblivion
    Unavailable
    Oblivion
    Unavailable
    Oblivion
    Ebook347 pages5 hours

    Oblivion

    By Sergei Lebedev

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In one of the first twenty-first century Russian novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system, a young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbor who saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds, among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags, is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where man and machine worked in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today's Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to rescue history from the brink of oblivion.

    Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. His first novel, Oblivion, has been translated into many languages.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew Vessel Press
    Release dateJan 18, 2016
    ISBN9781939931290
    Unavailable
    Oblivion
    Author

    Sergei Lebedev

    Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. Lebedev is a poet, essayist and journalist. His novels have been translated into many languages and received great acclaim in the English-speaking world. The New York Review of Books has hailed Lebedev as 'the best of Russia's younger generation of writers'.

    Read more from Sergei Lebedev

    Related to Oblivion

    Related ebooks

    Psychological Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Grand Adventure

      Jan 21, 2021

      A Grand Adventure
      7 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Jun 5, 2023

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      From The Foreword To Debths

      Jun 27, 2017

      From The Foreword To Debths
      6 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: Winter 2023

      Jan 12, 2023

      Nick Ripatrazone spotlights the best poetry collections of Q1. The post Must-Read Poetry: Winter 2023 appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      “Where Poetry Comes From”

      Sep 1, 2020

      This is what power really is: the privilege of ignoring anything you might find distasteful. —Oksana Zabuzhko “Language, any language,” observed the young poet Oksana Zabuzhko, “is the capital love of my life” because “nothing else has the power to s

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Exuberant Diversity of Ukrainian Literature

      Feb 24, 2023

      When Russia invaded Ukraine one year ago, the region of Sumy, just northeast of Kyiv, came under intense bombardment, endangering the house where Anton Chekhov spent two halcyon summers working on his play The Wood Demon, as well as several short sto

      12 min read

    • Article

      Native American Poetry Anthology Vibrates With Powerful Voices

      Sep 16, 2020

      U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo serves as lead editor of this new collection, which showcases a range of poems as vast as the continent.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: May 2020

      May 6, 2020

      Our own Nick Ripatrazone takes a look a new poetry from John Freeman, Rosanna Warren, Juditha Dowd and Kiki Petrosino—plus an anthology edited Leah Silvieus and Lee Herrick. The post Must-Read Poetry: May 2020 appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Stephen Dodson

      Dec 1, 2017

      I wasn’t planning to make Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution my lead review as I was reading it; it seemed overlong and somewhat scattered.  But by the time I was done, I realized I had been badly mistaken: Slez

      4 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: September 2019

      Sep 5, 2019

      Eight new and notable collections you want on your nightstand this month, including work by a lost Catalan master and the latest from our new poet laureate. The post Must-Read Poetry: September 2019 appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Dec 2, 2019

      Is not January the hardest month to get through? When you have weathered that, you get into the gulf-stream of winter, nearer the shores of spring. —Henry David Thoreau, Journal, February 2, 1854 [T]he pure luxury of a cloudless sky designed not to

      4 min read

    • Article

      Charlotte Higgins

      Mar 1, 2024

      Charlotte Higgins
      3 min read

    • Article

      Apparition

      Mar 26, 2020

      Apparition
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Moskva Pool

      Jun 1, 2022

      The Moskva Pool
      8 min read

    • Article

      Dissident Lit

      Sep 1, 2022

      My sophomore year in college, I took a class on the Russian novel. I remember our goodlooking young professor striding across campus in a long black coat, heads turning in his wake. It was said he looked like Lenin. His eyes burned like coals, his ch

      9 min read

    • Article

      Triumphs of Pseudoscientific Reasoning: On Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Journey to Armenia’

      Oct 8, 2018

      1. In 1922, the same year the USSR entered the world, the poet Osip Mandelstam moved to Moscow, hoping to establish himself as a leading voice of the Socialist utopia he’d supported since his teens. Instead, he found himself an outcast. In early Sovi

      10 min read

    • Article

      Staff Picks: Detritus, Dreamin’, Dinos

      Jul 14, 2017

      From Paleoart.   First published in 1966, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, by Justin Kaplan, is still the standard biography of our most enduringly funny writer—or, at least, the earliest writer who makes me actually laugh. I avoided it till now because I

      5 min read

    Reviews for Oblivion

    4/5

    15 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I found this novel to be slow and rather dull, but also important, so I stuck it out. And it took me 16 days to listen to this--an under-10-hour book.There is no plot per se, instead a young man travels to the Russian taiga to learn more about the elderly man "Grandfather II" who save his life twice--before he was born, and then with a blood transfusion later that ultimately killed the elderly man himself. Who was he? Where did he come from, what was his history?So this young man travels east and north, to the region of Soviet prison camps and mines, where a few reindeer herders who escaped the Soviets settling them still live, where escaped prisoners still escape to, and area and people that Russia ignores. And he learns about Grandfather IIs past. It is not what he expected.I found this very interesting if dull and plotless. I would really prefer this story in nonfiction form, but I don't know if that has been written (or these days, if it can be written at all)--or translated into English if it does exist.I liked the narration, Daniel Gamburg has enough of a Russian accent to pronounce Russian words and names properly and to lend a feeling of authenticity (and I could not forget where the story was)--but not so strong as to be hard to understand in any way.
    • 4/5
      Lebedev begins OBLIVION with a young narrator who seems to be enjoying an idyllic childhood in a wealthy suburban Russian setting. One quickly learns, however, that this is a deceptive metaphor for the political amnesia that is prevalent in Russia. Using a clever plot structure, Lebedev forces the reader to gaze instead upon the unspeakable horrors of Stalinism. The crimes of the Soviet gulags have been willfully expunged by the State from the people’s consciousness. "All the executions, all the murders were forgotten, an entire era had settled to the bottom of memory." This then becomes Lebedev’s goal: to rescue this Russian heritage from the oblivion the State has consigned it to.The unnamed narrator tells of a mysterious old man who has adopted his family. He comes to know him as Grandfather II. This elderly man is detached and alienated from the others. Now blind, he “seemed to have already lived his life, his existence outlasting his destiny.” In a strange way, Grandfather II appropriates the narrator, showing no affection, but instead treating the boy as a kind of possession. When a rabid dog attacks the boy, the old man beats the dog to death with his cane and brings the boy to the hospital where the doctors tell him that he needs a transfusion to save his life. The old man gives him the needed transfusion and he, in turn, dies as a result. This becomes the defining metaphor for the novel because from that point, the boy feels he is connected to the old man and in a way has inherited his sins. Thus he feels compelled to learn about Grandfather II’s past. The narrator’s quest consumes the latter part of the novel. He is now an adult and a geologist (This is an interesting choice since his main function for the remainder of the book is excavation). He first becomes aware of the remnants of the gulag while flying over Siberia for his work. Later he begins to realize that the ideologies that generated the gulag could be seen in the stark architecture all over Russia. “I intuitively recognized those camp barracks. They were hidden inside the buildings, clad in pathetic architectural dress—and yet they were revealed in general outlines, corners, and most important in the sense of deadly . . . dreariness.”A letter found among the old man’s possessions provides a clue and prompts a quest to find the sender in Siberia. What he finds there ranges from the grim to the absolutely horrific. The grim images consist of devastated forests, abandoned mines, decayed barracks, rusted vehicles and roads being reclaimed by nature. The horrific are human skulls, mass graves, frozen corpses and trucks transporting “bones covered with a red-stained tarp."Through a series of interviews, the narrator discovers that Grandfather II was a ruthless warden at one of the camps and was responsible for much of the carnage that took place there. He eventually comes to terms with his inheritance from the old man when he visits an island where prisoners were exiled to die. There he descends into a sinkhole where he encounters the old man’s victims frozen in the permafrost. This is not an easy book to read because of its dark subject matter. Yet it seems important because of its courage. The novel reads a little like a detective story, but clearly has a larger agenda. The narrative is often lyrical, evoking images of the land and its people. However, it seems marred by over-writing. Using long sentences with multiple clauses, Lebedev inserts himself into the narrative with barely relevant observations about language, memories and life in general. The narrative is weakest in these long didactic sections, but more powerful when the narrator describes what he sees and relates the interactions he has with the people he meets.
    • 4/5
      As a child, the protagonist of this novel nearly died but was saved by a mysterious neighbor known to him only as Grandfather II. The effort to save him cost Grandfather II his life and forever changed the young boy who lived. Much later, as an adult, the protagonists decides to follow the few clues he has about Grandfather II past into the frozen tundra of Russia to uncover more about the identity of the man who saved him.This story is a brooding, mournful, and lyrical meditation on the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system and how it transformed the land and the people it occupied. As the protagonist travels farther and farther into the burning white landscape he will travel deeper and deeper into his memory and the collective memory of his country.