The Monkey Comes for Its Skull: A Novel

Yuri Dombrovsky (1909–1978) — a prose writer, poet, and “great character of the era,” who went through several arrests and camps. Author of the novels “The Monkey Comes for Its Skull,” “The Keeper of Antiquities,” and “The Faculty of Useless Things.” Jean-Paul Sartre called him “the last classic of the 20th century.”

The novel “The Monkey Comes for Its Skull” was started by Yuri Dombrovsky in 1943, and in 1949, the text along with its author was arrested; it was published only after Stalin's death. The place and time are some European country in the pre-war and post-war years, engulfed in fascism, where “everything alive, rational, and thinking is declared subject to extermination.” Hans Mezonye, a journalist and son of an anthropologist, tries to resist the catastrophe that could plunge the world into darkness again a few years after World War II.

“"The monkey's paw has hung over Europe… If things continue at this pace, in a month a living Pithicanthropus will come to your institute's office for its skull, but in its hands, it will have not a club, but an automatic rifle." And the monkey comes, while three intellectuals sit in armchairs, smoking pipes and discussing the friendship of Schiller and Goethe...”