The Matiushin Case
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The Matiushin Case is among the most powerful recent works of Russian fiction. Deriving, like Captain of the Steppe (2013, And Other Stories), from Oleg Pavlov's experience of the declining Soviet Union, it follows Matiushin, a young man damaged by brutality at home and then in the army. Drawing on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "labor-camp writing," Oleg Pavlov builds a unique tension between the horrors of conscription and the dreamlike, timeless mode of his writing. Matiushin's "crime and punishment" thus emerge with compelling inevitability; the victim turns killer. This hell is above all psychological--and no less universal than those of Dante or Dostoevsky.
Oleg Pavlov is one of the most highly-regarded contemporary Russian writers. He won the Russian Booker Prize in 2002 and the Solzhenitsyn Prize in 2012.
Andrew Bromfield
Translated by
Andrew Bromfield is a translator of Russian literary and cultural texts with more than forty years of experience. His numerous translations range from Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Bulgakov to more modern authors such as Boris Akunin, Victor Pelevin, and Mikhail Shishkin. He currently works out of Bethesda, Maryland.
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