In a remote Russian province in the late nineteenth century, Bishop Mitrofanii must deal with a family crisis. After learning that one of his great aunt's beloved and rare white bulldogs has been poisoned, the Orthodox bishop knows there is only one detective clever enough to investigate the murder: Sister Pelagia.

The bespectacled, freckled Pelagia is lively, curious, extraordinarily clumsy, and persistent. At the estate...

Closing the gap between the contemporary Russian novel and the masterpieces of the early Soviet avant-garde, this masterful mixture of prose and poetry, excerpts from private letters and diaries, and quotes from newspapers and NKVD documents, is a unique amalgam of documentary, philosophical novel, and black humor.

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...