My Soul Pavel

Alexey Varlamov — prose writer, philologist, author of several biographies of writers, as well as novels, among which is “Thinking Wolf”. Laureate of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Literary Prize, and the “Big Book” and “Student Booker” prizes. 1980. Instead of the promised communism in the USSR — the Olympics, and no one believes in anything. Neither in the Soviet power nor in its collapse. The main character of the novel “My Soul Pavel” is an exception. Naive and dreamy, an ideologically minded Komsomol member, Pasha Nepomiluev arrives in Moscow from a closed secret town, where idyllic descriptions of life from Soviet newspapers are reality. By a miracle, he enrolls in university, but instead of lectures, he ends up “on potato duty,” where intellectual fourth-year students open his eyes to much about the life of the great country he loves but hardly knows. “The strange balancing between the real and the unreal is not invented by Varlamov, but drawn from life itself in the Soviet Union. Before us is not only the story of first-year student Pavel but a medieval plot about Prince Joasaph, who is shut off from the world by a wall. Everything begins — I allow myself a pun — with the fall of the wall. It is a tale of Varlam and Joasaph. Perhaps even — about Varlamov and Joasaph.” Evgeny Vodolazkin