Censored Tales, by Tony Rothman (Hardcover)

“Surreal and witty, bitterly ironic, deadly serious and deeply moving by turns, Tony Rothman’s Censored Tales capture something of the soul of Russia.” —David Mason, Eastern Daily Press

“The very best stories seem to be those in which the author/narrator risks an exploration of his more painful responses to the society with which he feels such affinity.” —Carol Rumens, The Times Literary Supplement

Years ago, tourists returned from the USSR with a fur hat; Tony Rothman brought back a samizdat store of everyday events and non-events, literature and folklore, to provide the raw materials for his Censored Tales.

This sequence of stories distills the reality and the ever-present fantasticality of a 20th century Russia poised between the receding ice age of Brezhnev, the dawn of Gorbachev’s perestroika, and driving headlong into the current surreal reality of Putin.

“The Grave of Alexander Nevsky” is a tourist guide to Leningrad and its environs written by a medieval monk. “Alcohol and Alchemy” takes its theme in part from the anti-drunkenness campaign and in part from the role played by alchemy in the Russian world view. “Storming the Bolshoi” is about getting a ticket and a refrigerator. “Five Metamorphose on a Russian Folktale” dissects a genuine fairy tale from the Russian tradition, while “The Albanian” is an international fairy story concerning the visit of an Albanian refugee, or perhaps an ambassador, to a small city-state. “Calendar Girl” is a full novella-romance set in the days immediately following the collapse of the USSR.

Throughout these pages, censors intrude on the text—state censors, well-meaning censors, even the author himself in the role of censor, as if he has something to hide. Censored Tales emerges nonetheless as a portrait through fictions of a Russia Rothman saw as fast disappearing at the tail end of the 20th century, but which seems poised to return (in more than one country) literally overnight.