Dark Lida

In Vladimir Lidsky's book, stories and tales are gathered, the heroes of which are inextricably linked to Lida — a small Belarusian town that has witnessed the tragic events of history. For the author, this is a kind of Macondo — a semi-mythical ancestral nest, where his distant ancestors once lived.
By examining the fates of his characters, Lidsky unfolds before us a comprehensive historical canvas of the first half of the 20th century — a terrifying time of turmoil, darkness, and upheavals, when "the cosmic rumble hung over the country".
The captivating plots of the book flow into one another; the tales and stories are written in one sentence without capital letters, as if fragments snatched from the flow of speech. As the author says, "almost all my texts tell stories of heroes who are dissolved in time, and against the backdrop of their stories, I try to show how time flows into itself and repeats itself". This is a vivid, engaging narrative that seems to draw the reader into a vortex and doesn't let go until the very end.