A Present Past

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents A Present Past by Sergei Lebedev, read by Bert Seymour.

“Ghosts are not born by themselves. They are born of a silent conscience. They are as real as the ignored knowledge of crimes and the refusal to accept real responsibility. They are the distorted voice of the dead turned into mystical images. The voice of unwanted witnesses.”

A Present Past is a collection of short stories that brings to vivid life a post-Soviet world haunted by the secrets and crimes of its past. It features a judge overcome by the weight of his ruling, the stories of those that lie within the Pokrovsky Cemetery, discovered objects that transport us to another time and the documents of the KGB. Seamlessly blending history with fiction, politics with individualism, reality with magic, the eleven tales explore the unacknowledged crimes of the Soviet Union and Russian State, and shows how the devastating sins of the past pervade the present.

Critics Review

A tour de force – exquisite and gripping, finely translated, fiction that pulls you into the beautiful and brutal service of imagining and understanding the human realities of modern Russia, a series of tales meticulously crafted and deeply imagined.
Philippe Sands, author of East West Street
One of Russia's most prominent contemporary writers, Lebedev, 41, has been hailed for a series of novels that hold a mirror up to Russia's blighted past. A former geologist, he chips away at the deep strata of his country's 20th-century history, the seams of trauma concealed by a state-sanctioned campaign of oblivion.
The Financial Times
A luminous and magical writer, Sergei Lebedev excavates the Soviet past and gives voice to its restless ghosts. By exploring Russia’s dark history he sheds light on its terrible present. Lebedev’s stories are urgent and compelling at a time when a Kremlin leader is waging a myth-inspired war in Ukraine.
Luke Harding, author of Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival
Memories of the Soviet era emerge through relics, landmarks, and fantastical occurrences in this satisfying collection . . . Lebedev adds vibrant lyrical descriptions to the strange interplay of past and present . . . There's a real payoff to these rich and ambiguous stories.
Publishers Weekly
We know from William Faulkner that 'the past is never dead, [and that] it is not even past'. Yet some pasts are more consequential than others, and Sergei Lebedev’s prose captures vividly the crippling presence of Russia’s Stalinist past in the life of contemporary Russian society. A very important read.
Jan Tomasz Gross
Lebedev's vibrant, steely fiction has always shown how the weight of Russia's past shapes its present, and this story collection also exhibits a fantastical edge ... the discerning will find much brilliance here
Library Journal
In these brilliant, terrifying stories, Lebedev makes the unseen visible, invoking the spirits of things and places, to say nothing of the anguished souls of the dead themselves. Only a poet – or a shaman – could make us all see what is here. The tales are wonderfully told, completely real and harrowing.
Catherine Merridale, author of Lenin on the Train
In this striking new collection of eleven stories by the leading exponent of Russian memory fiction, perpetrators conceal their guilt, descendants replay past traumas, and even the most gruesome ‘evidence of evil’ produces little punishment. As state controls over Russian history and memory grow ever tighter, these terrifying tales of the unburied and uncanny warn of the dire consequences of forgetting, and urgently appeal for remembrance and repentance.
Professor Polly Jones

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