Compelling reading: brilliantly vivid and inventive, it combines magical-realist mischief with a compassionate, radically Christian perspective on the self-destroying idiocies of human history and political posturing. A masterpiece by one of Europe’s finest contemporary novelists. —Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury
A History of the Island is Vodolazkin’s latest novel to be translated into English and the most overtly concerned with the idea of history. … Italo Calvino might be the nearest cousin to Vodolazkin. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, a quasi-allegorical tale of Britian, present and past, might be the nearest thing I’ve read to A History of the Island. … The book is a formal success because of its narrative strategy: the monk’s chronicle, able to reveal meaning where modern scientific history cannot. —Jonathan Geltner, author, Absolute Music
A History of the Island powerfully demonstrates the constructed nature of historical narratives and shows the dangers of a single dominating story. The Ukrainian-born Vodolazkin’s novels often draw on the author’s academic work on medieval East Slavic literature. … While current ideological demands define medieval Rus’ as the source of “authentic Russianness,” Vodolazkin’s novel, inspired by his own research into the subject, shows that the time period was as unstable and fluctuating as the present, rejecting the notion of a stable premodern past. Though the original novel was published two years before the invasion, the history of the imaginary island, echoing those of medieval Rus’, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation, becomes an ever more poignant allegory for these histories and the real discontinuities they present. —Venya Gushchin, Full Stop
Vodolazkin’s history of the “island” hilariously skewers our pretensions to originality. … He is at his funniest when he fights fire with ironic fire. No matter who governs the island’s post-medieval government and no matter what their reigning ideology, we’ve seen it all before; we know the ignominy, brutality, and absurdity in which it will end. … However, as Vodolazkin recognizes, satire’s function is to clear away the drivel, to make way for something else. … Many critics will no doubt view History of the Island with the same cosmopolitan distaste with which they view the final, excruciatingly naïve redemption scene in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Contemporary sensibilities tend to prefer the nihilist abyss to such salvation. —Aaron Weinacht, Front Porch Republic
Ukrainian-born writer Eugene Vodolazkin takes up this myth of the hereditary ruler as the holy and righteous protector of the people and sets it at the center of an investigation into the nature of history and time... Vodolazkin once again makes the case for living in the present, this time on a grander scale. —Fare Forward Magazine
Eugene Vodolazkin, a Ukrainian writer who lives in Russia, is known throughout Eastern Europe and beyond for being a wise and decent voice. A modern Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, perhaps? Perhaps time will tell. —Hearts and Minds Bookstore
Vodolazkin is a contemporary writer only as by accident of time. ... He is more of a medieval than a modern, and many of the paradoxes that perplex us today are, in his hands, playthings. He juggles his symbols dexterously, weaving an airborne pattern that we thrill to follow, and then just when we begin to feel rather clever for seeing what he is doing, he slips in a line gently mocking us. —The European Conservative
Eugene Vodolazkin’s A History of the Island skewers all pretentious claims about history as a grand and noble march toward a bright future where Important People will usher in democracy and freedom for all. And it manages to be downright funny while doing so. —Jeffrey Bilbro, Current Magazine
Vodolazkin ironizes on the way this history is constantly being rewritten, according to each current political era. —Irish Sun
Vodolazkin’s novels are wildly experimental, and A History of the Island is his most ambitious novel to date. Transmuting old facts and fables into fresh fiction, Vodolazkin is a literary alchemist whose novels invite us to think like medievals and mystics in the modern wasteland. —Law & Liberty
Dostoevskyan. —First Things
A History re-envisions the tragic irony in the “forward march.” For every supposedly shiny progress, what shadowy cost remains untallied? —Joshua Hren, Church Life Journal
