The Light and the Dark — Mikhail Shishkin

The only author to win all three major Russian literary prizes (including the Russian Booker Prize), Mikhail Shiskin is one of the most acclaimed contemporary Russian literary figures. The Guardian said of Shishkin's writing: “richly textured and innovative. . .  arguably Russia's greatest living novelist.”
 
The Light and the Dark, Shiskin's was hailed in The Times Literary Supplement  as “wonderfully lucid and concise,” reaching “over the heads of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to the tradition of Pushkin.” The Guardian said it was “both philosophically ambitious and sensually specific, evoking the rain on a dacha roof, the smell of blossoming lime trees, or the stink of human corpses . . . The Light and the Dark is about everything.”

The Light and the Dark is an evocative and ambitious reimagining of a time-honored precept: two young people in love, separated by circumstance.

When Vovka joins the army to fight The Boxer Rebellion, resolving to “choose himself a war,” he and Sasha write passionate letters to each other to feed their love. As we are drawn further into the separate physical realities of Vovka and Sasha, Shiskin gracefully unfolds the truly great and mystical nature of the gulf between them, and reveals a connection that transcends historical and temporal bounds. 

Sensuous, daring, and poignant, The Light and the Dark is an astonishing accomplishment and an affecting read.


From the Hardcover edition.