Sergey Gandlevsky is widely recognized as one of the leading living Russian poets and prose writers. His autobiographical novella" Trepanation of the Skull" is a portrait of the artist as a young late-Soviet man. At the center of the narrative are Gandlevsky s brain tumor, surgery, and recovery in the early 1990s. The story radiates out, relaying the poet s personal history through 1994, including his unique perspective on the 1991 coup by Communist hardliners resisted by Boris Yeltsin. Gandlevsky tells wonderfully strange but true episodes from the bohemian life he and his literary...