Sergei Lebedev

• Biography

  Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. He is a poet, essayist, and journalist, and one of Russia’s most lauded young writers. Oblivion, his first novel, has been translated into many languages and was published in English in 2016 to great acclaim.

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• Praise for Books

  “A thriller dipped in poison…[that] shares some of le Carré’s fascination with secret worlds and the nature of evil.” —New York Times

  “Examines the psychological trauma Stalinism continues to unleash—even on those who never lived during his reign…Antonina W. Bouis has translated the best of Soviet and post-Soviet writings…and the ease with which she renders Mr. Lebedev’s prose creates the illusion that both his novels were originally written in English.” — Wall Street Journal

  “A Dantean descent…In a steely translation by Antonina W. Bouis, Oblivion is as cold and stark as a glacial crevasse, but as beautiful as one, too, with a clear poetic sensibility built to stand against the forces of erasure.” —Wall Street Journal

  “The absence of evidence makes accounts from the living, such as this courageous novel, all the more significant.” —Wall Street Journal

  “Depicts objects in a stunningly, almost freakishly precise way, coaxing the metaphysical to express itself through the material.” —Times Literary Supplement (London)

  “Sergei Lebedev opens up new territory in literature. Lebedev’s prose lives from the precise images and the author’s colossal gift of observation.” —Der Speigel

  “Lebedev has perceived what was invisible to most Soviet and post-Soviet writers.” —Vladimir Sorokin, author of The Blizzard

  “Gorgeously written…leaves readers with a new insight into a towering moment in modern history.” — Winnipeg Free Press

  “With Oblivion, Lebedev is asking us to remember a part of Russia’s history that some would like to erase: the Soviet prison camp system. Here we are faced with difficult questions of memory and forgiveness, and the necessity of remembering the past.” —BookRiot.com

  “Spellbinding insight into a secret world that we forget at our peril, a world of assassins, spies, patriots, and poison masters whose shockingly evil decisions are made in their unwavering belief of serving a greater good.” —Rory MacLean, author of Pravda Ha Ha

  “One of the best novels to come out of Russia in a generation.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)

  “Pushes poetic language to the edge…astonishing…This book’s quiet anger is well-timed.” —MacLean’s

  “A taut spy thriller with Gothic flourishes…[and] insight into the psychological effects of poisoning, literal and metaphorical.” —The Economist (London)

  “Absorbing…A seamlessly written child’s-eye view that conveys an adult understanding of history’s burdens.” —Library Journal (starred review)

  “The beauty of the language is almost impossible to bear.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Frankfurt)

  “[A] le Carré-ish plot…Lebedev’s fiction excavates what lies beneath: the inner lives of earlier generations, buried under layers of official myth and self-deceit.” —The Guardian (London)

  “You read and reread Lebedev’s lyrical, cutting prose with equal amounts of awe and enjoyment…Gorgeously written, unsettling.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “A monomaniacal meditation on memory and forgetting…Lebedev’s magnificent novel has the potency to become a mirror and a wake-up call to a Russia that is blind to history.” —Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich)

  “[An] excellent translation…There is an elegance, and urgency, to the narrative’s slow unfolding of secrets and memories. Untraceable invites us to look at what has been hidden in plain sight.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

  “A remarkable bildungsroman, set against the decline of the Soviet Union…A smart, convincing, and affecting novel.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Opening in stately fashion and unfolding ever faster with fierce, intensive elegance, this first novel discloses the weight of Soviet history and its consequences…The language is precise yet lyrical, with much revealed through dreams, as if the Soviet reality were otherwise too awful to touch. Verdict: Highly recommended for anyone serious about literature or history.” —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Intense…intelligent and stunning, Untraceable is a character-driven thriller about the price of control.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)

  “By placing us in inhumanity’s long, shiver-inducing shadow and opening a fresh window on the state’s efforts to wipe the gulag era from history, Lebedev takes his place beside Solzhenitsyn and other great writers who have refused to abide by silence. Lebedev’s courageous and devastating first novel…applies modern insight and poetic force to atrocities past and to his country’s unspoken campaign to remove them from history.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Probing the…horrors that science casually inflicts on people, animals, and the environment…A darkly absorbing intellectual thriller.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “The determination of Kulak laborers, the desperation of a fugitive prisoner, the desolation of an empty library, the tragedy of a boy and his whistle, are among the many images capturing the impoverished state of the land, the people, and the national spirit, left by an unjust and undeniable part of Russian history.” —Publishers Weekly

  “One of Russia’s most interesting young novelists takes on Putin, poison, and power in…a fascinating window on modern Russia.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author

  “An important book about where Russia is today, with poetic descriptions and unforgettable images evoking that nation’s often elusive attempts to understand its dark past. I stand in awe of both the author and translator.” —Jack F. Matlock Jr., former US ambassador to the Soviet Union

  “Enthralling and exquisite, by one of modern Russia’s finest writers.” —Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

  “An extraordinary book that takes readers across Russia’s desolate northern landscape and turns up secrets about the terrible legacy of the Soviet gulags, described through evocative, often poetic portraits of people and places.” —Celestine Bohlen, International New York Times columnist and former Moscow correspondent for the New York Times

  “The darkest impulses of science and power cross paths with human error and plots gone awry in Sergei Lebedev’s incisive and all-too-plausible Russian novel.” —Will Englund, Pulitzer Prize–winning former Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post

  “Extraordinarily intense and beautifully written…Oblivion haunts this novel. By writing it, Lebedev has given the past a present and a presence.” —Judy Dempsey, senior associate at Carnegie Europe and editor-in-chief of Strategic Europe

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  • Untraceable

  • By Sergei Lebedev

    Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

    Read by Saul Reichlin

  • Release Date: 3/30/21

  • Formats: Digital Audy

  The terrifying, lengthening list of Russia’s use of lethal poisons against its critics has inspired acclaimed author Sergei Lebedev’s latest novel. With uncanny timing, he examines how and why Russia and the Soviet Union have developed horrendous neurotoxins.

  At its center is a ruthless chemist named Professor Kalitin, obsessed with developing an absolutely deadly, undetectable, and untraceable poison for which there is no antidote. But Kalitin becomes consumed by guilt over countless deaths from his Faustian pact to create the ultimate venom. When the Soviet Union collapses, the chemist defects and is given a new identity in Western Europe.

  After another Russian is murdered with Kalitin’s poison, his cover is blown, and he is drawn into an investigation of the death by Western agents. Two special-forces killers are sent to silence him―using his own undetectable poison.

  In this fast-paced, genre-bending tale, Lebedev weaves suspenseful, stunningly beautiful prose exploring the historical trajectories of evil. From Nazi labs, Stalinist plots, and the Chechen Wars to present-day Russia, Lebedev probes the ethical responsibilities of scientists supplying modern tyrants and autocrats with ever newer instruments of retribution, destruction, and control.

  • Untraceable

  • By Sergei Lebedev

    Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

    Read by Saul Reichlin

  • Release Date: 3/30/21

  • Formats: Digital Audy

  Learn More
• 

  • The Year of the Comet

  • By Sergei Lebedev

    Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

    Read by Daniel Gamburg

  • Release Date: 4/18/17

  • Formats: Digital Audy

  An idyllic childhood takes a sinister turn. Rumors of a serial killer haunt the neighborhood, families pack up and leave town without a word of warning, and the country begins to unravel. Policemen stand by as protesters overtake the streets, knowing that the once awe-inspiring symbols of power they wear on their helmets have become devoid of meaning. Lebedev depicts a vast empire coming apart at the seams, transforming a very public moment into something tender and personal, and writes with stunning beauty and shattering insight about childhood and the growing consciousness of a boy in the world.

  • The Year of the Comet

  • By Sergei Lebedev

    Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

    Read by Daniel Gamburg

  • Release Date: 4/18/17

  • Formats: Digital Audy

  Learn More
• 

  • Oblivion

  • By Sergei Lebedev

    Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

    Read by Daniel Gamburg

  • Release Date: 2/01/16

  • Formats: Digital Audy

  This masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to examine a very troubled Russia.

  In one of the first twenty-first century Russian novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison-camp system, a young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbor who saved his life and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds, among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags, is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past.

  This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where man and machine worked in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today’s Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to rescue history from the brink of oblivion.

  • Oblivion

  • By Sergei Lebedev

    Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

    Read by Daniel Gamburg

  • Release Date: 2/01/16

  • Formats: Digital Audy

  Learn More

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