Evgenii Belodubrovskii's Thirteen Coats is a meditation on Leningrad-St. Petersburg from his birth in 1941 on the eve of the German invasion, his survival of the three-year blockade, and his post-war Leningrad literary life. Russia's twentieth century traumas--two world wars and its long civil war--endured until Stalin's death (1953). If there is a big picture, perhaps it is contained within the pages of The Black Book of Communism whereby French humanists struggled to enumerate the tens of millions murdered in the name of the twentieth century religion of Communism. Yet, numbers empty...

Spirit Falls/Ledokhod, a dual-language Russian-English publication, is the first novel in "The Long War," a five-novel series played out against the backdrop of the Cold War. On the coldest night of that winter the gypsy-like refugee Marina unexpectedly joins Ricky Belisle and Marie Jeanne, "M.J.," Charbonneau at curtain call on the night of their school's Christmas program. Her arrival looses a cascade of events that ultimately finds Ricky carrying M.J. in his arms across the Great Bogus Swamp into the teeth of a 100-year Lake Superior storm. If she survives he vows an ultimate sacrifice. In...