The Monastery
Published on 30. July 2020
Book
Hardback
662 pages
978-1-912894-79-6 (ISBN)
Description
The late 1920s… Convicted of murdering his father, Artiom Goriainov is serving a sentence of several years on the Solovki Archipelago. Artiom is a strong young man who survives all facets of the hell that is the Soviet camps: hunger, cold, betrayal, the death of friends, a failed escape attempt and a love affair. Unlike the many political prisoners at Solovki, he has no strong convictions. He is an everyman who, like the Virgil of Solovki, simply narrates what is happening in front of his eyes. His only motivation is to survive.
Founded in the 15th century on an archipelago in the White Sea, from 1923 the monastery became a "camp of special designation," the foundation stone of the Soviet GULAG system. The novel describes a period when Solovki was being converted from a re-education camp for "socially damaging elements" into what eventually became a mass labor camp. The notion of a Utopia for "forging new human beings," complete with a library, athletic events, and research laboratories, eventually mutated into a hell of despotism and brutality.
Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 43 mm
Weight
1210 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-912894-79-6 (9781912894796)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Zakhar Prilepin was born near Ryazan in 1975. Prilepin had a varied life before dedicating himself to writing, spending time as a student, as a labourer, as a journalist and as a soldier, serving with the Special Forces in Chechnya. More recently Prilepin has come to the public attention not only as one of the best writers of his generation, but as a committed, and often controversial, political activist on behalf of the "Other Russia" coalition. Prilepin lives in Nizhny Novgorod where he is the regional editor of independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta. His website is one of the most popular author's sites in Russia.Prilepin's combination of lucid prose and social consciousness has made him one of the most popular and acclaimed writers in Russia today and drawn comparisons with the Russian classics. His novel Sankya, which draws on his own experiences to depict life among young political extremists, was shortlisted for the Russian Booker in 2007, when it also won the Yasnaya Polyana Award and the Best Foreign Novel of the Year Award in China. Prilepin's works have been translated into numerous foreign languages; regrettably, English-speaking readers have as yet had to content themselves with a handful of short stories.