First published 2025
Yevgeny has grown beyond the creative child hiding under his grandmother's table. Now a young artist in Leningrad, he navigates the underground art scene while dodging the KGB's watchful eye over Soviet Russia's creative community. An encounter with an American woman sparks romance and dreams of freedom overseas. But when military conscription threatens to send him to fight in Afghanistan, everything shifts in a moment. Yevgeny makes a desperate choice to control his destiny, leading to devastating results that land him in a state-run Siberian mental hospital. This graphic memoir follows his journey from the suffocating artistic underground to an asylum and eventually to safety in America. Yelchin balances the terror of Soviet oppression with dark humor, creating a vivid portrait of one young man's fight for creative freedom and escape from Cold War Russia.
Genres: art, historical-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, fish-out-of-water
Setting: Leningrad, Siberia, America
Period: Cold War
432 pages · Hardcover · Candlewick
Content warnings: mental-illness