About the Author

Oleg Pavlov is one of the most highly regarded Russian writers today. He has won the Russian Booker Prize (2002) and Solzhenitsyn Prize (2012) among many other awards. Born in Moscow in 1970, Pavlov spent his military service as a prison guard in Kazakhstan. Many of the incidents portrayed in his fiction were inspired by his experiences there; he recalls how he found himself reading about Karabas, the very camp he had worked at, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. He later became Solzhenitsyn's assistant and was inspired to continue the great writer's work. Pavlov's writing is firmly in the tradition of great Russian novelists such as Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn.

Reviews

‘Oleg Pavlov is a powerful writer, and Requiem for a Soldier is his finest work.’
*Vremya MN*

‘Russian Booker Prize-winner Pavlov writes with the confident eccentricity of a man who knows what to do with words.’
*Big Issue*

‘Requiem for a Soldier . . . is the standalone third volume in the Russian’s Booker Prize-winning trilogy Tales from the Last Days. Set at the end of the Soviet Empire it’s a slim, dark and poetic volume following Alyosha, a soldier who has finished his service, as he journeys to the kingdom of the dead. It’s both a grotesque portrayal of Soviet reality and an apocalyptic allegory.’
*Big Issue in the North*

‘Pavlov’s reputation and style sets him among the ranks of authors such as Genet and Burroughs with comparison also drawn to Faulkner and Kafka. Lovers of the haunting, poetic, literary grotesque of these authors combined with a healthy level of surrealist humour will find great satisfaction in the pages.’
*Booktrust*

Chekhov would approve . . . Pavlov [is] a witness with a flair for spectacular images of surreal beauty – a mouse “quivered like a little heart” – which simply ease into a narrative, blending heightened prose descriptions with political satire and punchy dialogue, often expressing exasperation, which is well rendered into colloquial English by Anna Gunin.’
*The Irish Times*

‘A triumph of Russian farce . . . At a time when the bodies of soldiers are being returned to their families from a war that the authorities assure us . . . the country is not fighting, we can only marvel at the author’s prescience.’
*Times Literary Supplement*

‘A meditation on death and the downfall of the Soviet Union suffused with all the bleak absurdity of a Samuel Beckett play . . . The final novel of the Tales From The Last Days trilogy, this is a memorable absurdist satire with great relevance today.’
*Workshy Fop*

‘A brutal and thought-provoking book.’
*The Lady*