Alexey Ivanov is an amazingly versatile writer who writes about different things in different ways, but every time — brilliantly!
Elena Shubina, publisher
From book to book, Aleksey Ivanov boldly experiments with content, style and genre form, works in a variety of literary formats: «Geographer Drank the Globe», «Bluda and MUDO», «Dorm on Blood» and «Bad Weather» — modern urban prose, » The Gold of Riot ”,“ The Heart of Parma ”and“ Tobol ”are modernist historical novels,“ Psoglavtsy ”and“ Community ”are intellectual thrillers.
And now a new literary experiment — the novel «Pishcheblok» — a seemingly simple and bright story, in fact, a story about very complex and serious things.
The hot summer of 1980. The capital is shaken by the Olympics, and in a small pioneer camp on the banks of the Volga everything is quiet and calm. Pioneers march on lines, play football and tell scary stories at night; young counselors fall in love with each other; the river tram brings cans of milk, and the village dogs are whirling around the catering center. But the life of the pioneer camp, at first glance, serene, has its own secret and dark side. Vampires hide among the pioneers. Their will determines what happens in plain sight …
There are children like children — with games, quarrels, fantasies and stupidity. There is pioneering, which is no longer needed by anyone and is formal. And there are vampires who need to live among people, but according to their own vampire rules. How does vampire mysticism infiltrate dead Soviet rituals and remake living and natural childish behavior? How do love and friendship resist the eschewing laws of ideology and vampirism? In a word, whose horn is blowing for the bugler and under whose drum is the drummer striding?
Aleksey Ivanov himself says about his novel as follows: “’Pishcheblok’ can be read as a kind of metaphor of Soviet life with ideology. If you replace vampirism with ideology, you will see that the social strategies of the first and the second are the same — this is total compulsion, violence. I believe that ideology is a dead thing. It interferes with the natural development of life. With it, we get the format of social life, which is unacceptable for human consciousness. In my novel, I wrote just about the fact that life according to ideology is wrong, even if the ideology seems to be right. »
© Ivanov A.V., 2018
© AST Publishing House LLC, 2018
© & ℗ Audiobook LLC, 2018
Audio Recording Producer: Tatiana Plyuta
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