The Matiushin Case - Softcover

'This lucid translation of Pavlov's powerful quasi-autobiographical novel confronts the horror of Russian history - a timeless quest for existential meaning and deals with the horror of Russian history through the microcosm of an individual's journey into hell.' Phoebe Taplin, The Guardian -------- 'Russian Booker Prize winner Pavlov (Captain of the Steppe) plunges readers into the grim realities of Soviet military life in the early 1980s ... Bromfield, well-known for his translations of contemporary Russian literature, ably renders Pavlov's prose with extremes of lyricism and banality. Pavlov pulls off a harrowing tale about institutional cruelty and the perversions of character that it produces.' Publishers Weekly -------- 'Written in a bare, stilted style, it never plays for the high drama - choosing instead to beat steadily on from one absurdity to the next, coolly piling horror on top of horror - Seen through a lens softened by exhaustion and cheap vodka, Pavlov's dark picture of existence becomes wryly amusing and often almost whimsical in its black humour.' Ross McIndoe, The Skinny -------- 'Images of violence and pain linger with the reader long after the book is finished. Not for the faint hearted.' Scarlett MccGwire, Tribune -------- '[A] descent into an uncaring military world.' San Francisco Book Review-------'[A] small stunner: brutal, salty, pulsing with hallucinatory beauty and lyrical grace - Pavlov's portrait of helpless young men trapped in an insane system comes out as a sly, sad, occasionally joyous tragicomedy about power, helplessness, escape, and what it's like to be young.' Pete Mitchell, Booktrust, Best Translated Books of 2014------

The Matiushin Case is one of the darkest and most powerful works of fiction to appear in Russian in the last twenty years. Deriving, like Captain of the Steppe (And Other Stories, 2013), from the author's own traumatic experience as a conscript in the last years of the Soviet Union, it follows the experience of Matiushin, a young, sensitive, disoriented man, damaged first by violence in his family then by the brutality of army life in Central Asia. Indebted to the different traditions of 'labour camp prose' pioneered by Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, the novel is, however, much more than an expose of societal ills, shocking enough though these are. Its literary achievement lies elsewhere: in the way that the horrific realities of conscript life are steeped in the unique mood of dreaminess and timelessness created by the setting and by Pavlov's prose-style and in the unique type of tension that this mood creates. Matiushin's 'crime and punishment' emerge from this tension with compelling inevitability; the victim turns killer. The hell that Oleg Pavlov describes is physical and societal, but above all psychological, and, as such, no less universal than that described by Dante or Dostoevsky.