Red Crosses

by Sasha Filipenko, Brian James Baer (Translator), Elln Vayner (Translator)

Overview

Sasha Filipenko traces the arc of Russian history from Stalin’s terror to the present day, in a novel full of heart and humanity.

One struggles not to forget, while the other would like nothing better. Tatiana Alexeyevna is an old woman, over ninety, rich in lived experience, and suffering from Alzheimer’s. Every day, she loses a few more of her irreplaceable memories. Alexander is a young man whose life has been brutally torn in two.

Tatiana tells her young neighbor her life story, a story that encompasses the entire Russian 20th century with all its horrors and hard-won humanity. Little by little, the old woman and the young man forge an unlikely friendship and make a pact against forgetting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609456931
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/24/2021
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sasha Filipenko, born in Minsk in 1984, is a Belarusian author who writes in Russian. After abandoning his classical music training, he studied literature in St. Petersburg and worked as a journalist, screenwriter and author for a satire show. Sasha Filipenko lives in St. Petersburg.

Brian James Baer is the founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies. He is the translator of Stories by Mikhail Zhvanetsky and Not Just Brodsky by Sergei Dovlatov, and the author of the monograph Other Russias (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Ellen Vayner has translated short stories, magazine interviews, and a conceptual artistic project. Her first full-length translation was Sacred Darkness.

Editorial Reviews

06/28/2021

Belarusian author Filipenko lays bare the recent history of a ruthless Russian state with the story of an unlikely friendship between a young widower and a survivor of Stalin’s gulag. In 2001, having just moved to Minsk, a grieving Sasha finds his apartment door marked with a red cross. It’s “here to help me find my way back home,” declares his neighbor, Tatyana Alexeyevna, who has Alzheimer’s. Tatyana wastes no time befriending Sasha and recounts the story of her life. Born in London in 1910 and educated abroad, she moved to Russia in 1919 with her Russian father, and married an architect in 1934 and had a daughter, before her husband became a POW during WWII. As punishment for being the wife of a traitor—for no true Soviet patriot would allow himself to be caught—Tatyana was arrested. After rape, torture, and a decade in the gulag, she was released, but her husband and daughter had long since disappeared. The narration and dialogue are often comically absurd: “God’s afraid of me. I have too many inconvenient questions for him,” Tatyana declares. This author brings freshness and wit to a familiar story of Soviet tragedy. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

A moving meditation on memory, forgetfulness, and the thirst for connection.”—Oprah Daily

“If you want to get inside the head of modern, young Russia, read Filipenko.”—Svetlana Alexievich (Nobel Prize winner, 2015)

“The most interesting thing [about Red Crosses] was to hear the voice of a young writer, from a generation who barely knew the Soviet times, and to see how he grapples with the subject... Nothing unlocks the human soul as profoundly as a novel can.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Belarusian author Filipenko lays bare the recent history of a ruthless Russian state with the story of an unlikely friendship between a young widower and a survivor of Stalin’s gulag... [He] brings freshness and wit to a familiar story of Soviet tragedy.”—Publishers Weekly

"[Red Crosses] explores 100 years of Russian history in under 200 pages... with an absurdist twist, focusing on the cruelty of the gulags and the failure of a bureaucratic system that was doomed from the start.”—PopMatters

“Sasha Filipenko expertly links past and present, building a bridge between intimacy and otherness.”—Kurier

“A tour de force. A book full of sound and fury, but also greatness and gentleness.”—Le Figaro littéraire

From the Publisher