Captain of the Steppe

About the Book

Deep in the desolate steppe, Captain Khabarov waits out his service at a camp where the news arrives in bundles of last year’s papers and rations turn up rotting in their trucks. One Spring, he decides to plant a field of potatoes to feed his half-starved men . . .

This blackly comic novel shows the unsettling consequences of thinking for yourself under the Soviet system. Oleg Pavlov’s first novel, published when he was only 24, Captain of the Steppe was immediately praised for its chilling but humane and hilarious depiction of the Soviet Empire’s last years.

About the Author :
Oleg Pavlov is one of the most highly regarded Russian writers alive 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 the great Russian novelists Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn. He was only 24 years old when his first novel, Captain of the Steppe, was published, receiving praise not only from critics but from the jury of the Russian Booker Prize, which shortlisted the novel for the 1995 award. Pavlov went on to win the Prize in 2002 with his next book, The Matiushin Case (English translation published in 2014 by And Other Stories). The Matiushin Case was the second novel in what would become the thematic trilogy set in the last days of the Soviet empire: Tales from the Last Days. All three works in the trilogy are stand-alone novels. The third book, Requiem for a Soldier, was published by And Other Stories in 2015.

Review :
'A comedy' as dark and bitter as ersatz coffee.' Daily Mail 'Pavlov imbues his world with a very particular flavour: the mixture of tragedy, absurdity and black comedy that runs in the veins of Russian literature as far back as the work of Nikolai Gogol ... Pavlov fashions a disquieting and comic elegy.' Marcel Theroux 'Pavlov skillfully navigates the razor-thin gap between dark comedy and tragedy' Words without Borders 'Captain of the Steppe becomes a brilliant and lasting expression of a bitter, righteous rage'. The Literateur 'His tales delve into the world of soldiers sent to the bleakest regions of central Asia, where their hopelessness ends up matching that of their prisoners, whose absurd routine, hunger and boredom they share. This is Berg's Wozzek set in Buzzati's Tartar Steppe.' Jacque Franck, lalibre.be 'An extraordinary portraitist, with a nose for trenchant, black humour, Oleg Pavlov delves into the shadowy outer edges of existence.' France Culture "The Book of Steppe seems to be stuck in the vast, boundless and bottomless space, where there is no roof and no place to hide." Inna Borisova (The First of September, 2008)