A Breathtakingly Beautiful and Heart-Wrenching Tale Set in an Unforgiving Soviet World

I first read this novel in its original Russian years ago, even before its official publication in Russia. It has since lived rent-free in my head and heart, and is one of my favourite books of all time.

The story of Yura and Volodya is written with extraordinary sensitivity. The characters are very life-like, and as a reader, you can’t help but move through joy, love, and fear and heartbreak along with them. The narrative takes you through intense emotional highs and lows, as beautiful revelations of the characters' emerging feelings of first love are followed by contemplations that their love is doomed, as not only the people and society around them regard anything of the nature with hostility or even pathologize it, but even the boys themselves at times get consumed by self-doubt and internalized homophobia.

I am not aware of anything else even remotely like this in Russian-language literature. When the authors made the brave move to have it finally published in Russia in 2021, it became a top bestseller and an instant cult novel. Simultaneously, high-profile Putinist propagandists were going on foaming-at-the-mouth rants against it. That backlash, and the subsequent banning of the novel in Russia, only gives more credit to its power.

I am deeply grateful to Anne E. Fisher for her thoughtful translation, which allows English-speaking readers to experience this unique story. I must admit, however, that some of the intricacies of the text may have been lost in translation, or been slightly incorrectly translated.
The lack of cultural familiarity with the setting that readers of a non-Russian or former Eastern bloc background would experience would make the novel a more challenging read, especially with the day to day details of the summer camp's life and the big load of Soviet propaganda that the campers in the setting have to endure. This will potentially make the novel feel slow, particularly in the first half but I urge you to continue - it gets a lot more clear!

A big thank you to Edoardo Ballerini for his moving narration.

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