A Present Past. Short Stories by Sergei Lebedev.

A Present Past: Titan and Other Chronicles

Short Stories by Sergei Lebedev

Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

A Present Past: Titan and Other Chronicles brings together eleven haunting and haunted short stories by Sergei Lebedev, in a translation by Antonina W. Bouis, who has previously translated Lebedev’s novels into English. I had come across the author through his novel Untraceable and had been intrigued into how Lebedev uses elements of genre fiction (in that case the spy thriller) to put across a social and political statement.  There is a similar approach in this short story collection published by New Vessel Press, except that while not abandoning the political thriller Lebedev here ventures into the realm of the ghost story and supernatural fiction. This is appropriate, as what are “ghosts” if not the intrusion into the present of a past deemed gone and forgotten?   As the author points out in the preface to the volume:

Soviet ideology – at least on paper – called for a rational view of the world and the only ghost allowed was the “specter of communism” that Marx and Engels had prophesied in the nineteenth century. That made it all the more astonishing how quickly the other world appeared, the “reverse” side of Soviet consciousness; a dark storeroom filled with everything that had been tossed, hidden, crossed out of life and memory during the seventy years of communist rule. A new mystical folklore arose before our eyes, seemingly out of the air of the epoch. It spoke of evil places, anomalous zones where the laws of physics did not hold. About strange creatures, poltergeists who lived in houses and apartments and persecuted residents they did not like... People’s minds sought images, sought a language to describe the tragedy, and they turned to mystical allusions to make the evil past real and at the same time managed to become estranged from it, turning it into the subject of another world and another reality.

Lebedev presents us with a Soviet and post-Soviet setting marked by the brutalities of the regimes of the 20th Century: not just Stalinism and its forebears and successors – although those, obviously, feature prominently -  but also anti-semitism the horrors of the Second World War (most clearly in “The Barn”).     The stories have the aura of the unheimlich, a sense of the uncanny and of unease which serves to evoke the feeling of danger and constant fear engendered by oppressive regimes.  In the tradition of dissident literature, the title story “Titan” about an anti-conformist writer and his spiritual heir or “The Letter Й”, are stories which portray individuals broken by the state. But in some cases, it is the perpetrators who are visited and punished by a remnant of the past (“Judge Stomakov”).    There is much horror in this volume (rarely explicit, more often roiling underneath) but I was also intrigued by the occasional outbursts of colourful fairytale-like passages – as in “The Night is Bright Tonight” – which reminded me of the rich tradition of Russian fantastical and magical realist literature by such authors as Alexei Remizov (who has, incidentally, also been translated by Antonina W. Bouis).    

This volume of Lebedev's short fiction will surely cement his already significant reputation in the English-speaking world while showing a different aspect to his craft from the novels which have brought him acclaim to date.

Expected publication

April 11, 2023 by New Vessel Press