Artem Chekh’s book Absolute Zero was reviewed in the LRB by James Meek.
A man named Victor is sleeping next to me. He is over sixty, a worker from the Kyiv suburbs. He has a moustache, calluses, grey hair. In the late 1980s he had some military experience, so he knows something about weapons and fortifications. In his downtime, however, Victor is constantly watching news on YouTube, which I find really annoying. When I ask him to use headphones he smiles good-naturedly: thank you, I’m fine.
The social identities behind the vintage references in Artem Chekh and Zakhar Prilepin’s works are the fundamental oppositions of the 21st century: on one side the liberals, the bourgeois, the cosmopolitans,...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.