Review: The Lady of the Mine by Sergei Lebedev

Synopsis: The mystical laundress at the center of this novel is obsessed with purity. Her task is formidable as she stands guard over a sealed shaft at a Ukrainian coalmine that hides terrible truths. The bodies of dead Jews lying in its depths seem to attract still more present-day crimes.

Acclaimed Russian author Sergei Lebedev portrays a ghostly realm riven by lust and fear just as the Kremlin invades the same part of Ukraine occupied by the Wehrmacht in World War Two.

Then corpses rain from the sky when a jetliner is shot down overhead, scattering luxury goods along with the mortal remains. Eerie coincidences and gruesome discoveries fill this riveting exploration of an uncanny place where the geography exudes violence, and where the sins of the past are never all that in the past.

Lebedev, who has won international praise for his soul-searching prose and unflinching examination of history’s evils, shines light on the fault line where Nazism met Soviet communism, evolving into the new fascism of today’s Russia.

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Hauntingly brilliant.

This is my third tome from Lebedev, It is set across five days in July 2014, in Ukraine, as Russian troops invade. The story is narrated by four characters: Zhanna, daughter of the mystical laundress; Valet, a former neighbour now in the police special regiment, who is fired by jealousy and vengeance; The General (Korol), who is fascinated by the shaft and its secrets; and The Engineer, the ghostly first victim to be buried there.

It does take a little bit to get into the rhythm of the prose but persevere and you will find a gripping story with elements of the supernatural.

Review: A Present Past by Sergei Lebedev

Synopsis: The Soviet and post-Soviet world, with its untold multitude of crimes, is a natural breeding ground for ghost stories. No one writes them more movingly than Russian author Sergei Lebedev, who in this stunning volume probes a collective guilty conscience marked by otherworldliness and the denial of misdeeds. 

These eleven tales share a mystical topography in which the legacy of totalitarian regimes is ever-present—from Katyn to Chechnya, from Lithuanian KGB documents to the streetscape of unified Berlin, from the fragments of family history to the echoes of foot soldiers in Russia’s wars of aggression. 

In these stories, as in Lebedev’s acclaimed novels, the voices of things, places, animals, and people seek justice for a restless past, where steel claws scrape just beneath the surface and where the heredity of evil is uninterrupted, unacknowledged, unnamed.

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I loved Lebedev's "Untraceable" - so was looking forward to reading more from him.

This series of short stories, haunting tales of a Soviet past intruding on a Soviet present, were very different from the abovementioned work, but were intriguing in themselves nonetheless. I would have to say that my favourite tale was "Titan" - the story of a person of interest to the Soviet Secret Police, who managed to turn the tables on them in a rather unique way.

For anyone wanting to further explore Russian literature, definitely pick this up!