Tabiya Thirty-Two

2081. After the catastrophe, the country was isolated from the outside world. Russian literature, declared the source of all woes, was replaced by chess, and instead of the novels of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, schools and universities study the games of Karpov, Spassky, and Botvinnik. Kirill studies the history of chess in graduate school, falls in love, becomes jealous, and lives the life of an entirely ordinary young man — until a series of sudden discoveries jeopardizes all his perceptions of the world. “Tabiya Thirty-Two” by Alexei Konakov is both a phantasmagorical puzzle novel about the fateful patterns of destiny, and a witty linguistic experiment on the cancellation of imperial thinking, and an exciting dystopia about attempts to finally solve the question of how to organize Russia.