Latest Review: Pushkin's Second Wife and Other Micronovels

An import from Peter Owen, Pushkin’s Second Wife and Other Micronovels is Yuri Druzhnikov’s latest book to be published in English and the latest addition to our review section. It was translated from the Russian by Thomas Moore and came out earlier this year.

The review is written by Irene Minkina, a student here at the University of Rochester who has been interning for the press this past semester.

Druzhnikov’s most famous novel is Angels on the Head of a Pin, but this sounds pretty intriguing as well, especially since it’s not a novel, and not stories, but a collection of “micronovels”:

Yuri Druzhnikov is most well known for his novel Angels on the Head of a Pin (2003), which was included on the University of Warsaw’s list of the top ten Russian novels of the twentieth century. Though six of his books have been translated in English, he has not received as much critical attention as other contemporary writers such as Victor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin. Pushkin’s Second Wife and Other Micronovels (2007) is Druzhnikov’s collection of ten “micronovels,” a term which Druzhnikov explains in the postcript, stating that “in the twenty-first century this new genre has acquired legitimacy, filling a niche for a genre in which large-novel ideas accumulate energy in the space of a mere thirty pages.”

[Click here for the rest of the review.]