The Zero Train

by Yuri Buida, Oliver Ready (Translator)

Overview

"The Zero Train is the most remarkable book I've read this year. It has been hugely successful in Russia, and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker prize. This chilling, brilliant and deeply moving novel goes to the heart of what Stalinism did to individual lives."
Helen Dunmore in The Observer Books of the Year

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781903517529
Publisher:	Dedalus, Limited
Publication date:	06/28/2001
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Yuri Buida is one of the foremost contemporary Russian writers. He was born in 1954 and is of mixed Russian, Polish, Belorussian and Ukranian descent. The question of identity runs through his fiction which tends towards mythmaking and the surreal. His novel The Zero Train was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize in 1993. His short story cycle The Prussian Bride won the prestigious Apollon Grigoriev Prize in 1999. Oliver Ready's translation for Dedalus was awarded the inaugural Russian Translation Prize in 2005.

Oliver Ready is a Research Fellow of St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, where he has taught Russian for a number of years. His translations include five books for Dedalus: The Zero Train and The Prussian Bride by Yuri Buida and Before and During, The Rehearsals and Be as Children by Vladimir Sharov and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment(Penguin), Nikolai Gogol's And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon(Pushkin).

Oliver Ready's translation of The Prussian Bride was awarded the inaugural Russian Translation Prize in 2005 and his translation of Before and During won The Read Russia Prize 2015 and The Rehearsals won The Read Russia Prize for the best translation of a contemporary Russian novel into any language in 2018.

He is the author of Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963-2013 (Peter Lang).

Editorial Reviews

This spare, swift 1993 novel explores the professional and emotional burdens borne by Ivan Ardyabev, a "railway forces private" assigned to a train settlement somewhere in rural Russia. The Kafkaesque Zero Train, which arrives and departs with unfailing precision, bearing an undisclosed cargo, is a perfect metaphor for the implacability of total regimentation, and the bitterness and paranoia it breeds in its dulled "workers." Buida captures their deadening experiences brilliantly in the details of Ardabyev's blind thrusts toward a fuller life, and final act of resistance. A rich, provocative allegory (which might be compared with Victor Pelevin's The Yellow Arrow)-and a fine introduction to an important contemporary Russian writer.

Kirkus Reviews