First published 2015
Deep in the basement archives of 1930s Leningrad, Roman Osipovich works as a Soviet censor, methodically airbrushing forbidden faces from official photographs. He becomes obsessed with one particular image: a disgraced prima ballerina whose beauty haunts him even as he erases her from history. His small act of preservation ripples across decades and continents, connecting lives in unexpected ways. In a Siberian mining town, women tell stories of their grandmothers who survived the gulags. Brothers protect each other with desperate love. Young men throughout the former Soviet Union confront brutality both at home and in military service. All their stories converge around a single oil painting of an unremarkable landscape that carries the memory of a peaceful past. Marra weaves nine interconnected tales that span from Stalin's purges to the modern era, showing how art survives even when those who create it do not.
Genres: art, literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century, russia
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: interconnected-stories, non-linear-narrative
Setting: Leningrad, Siberia
Period: 1930s, Modern Era
332 pages · Hardcover · Hogarth
Content warnings: death, violence