Guzel Jahina - Szerelvény Szamarkand felé

GUZEL JAHINA is one of the most exciting and internationally successful figures in contemporary Russian literature. Born and raised in Kazan, he obtained a liberal arts degree at the university there; currently lives in Moscow. Her first novel, Zulejka opens her eyes, about the Tatars exiled to Siberia, became the biggest Russian book success of 2015: it won the Great Book and Yasnaya Polyana prizes and was published in more than thirty countries. Children of the Volga was similarly successful, winning the "Made In Russia" award of Snob magazine in 2018, the Ivo Andrić Award in Serbia in 2019, and the Georg Dehio Award in Germany in 2020.

His new book takes place six years after the Bolshevik Revolution. Famine is raging in vast areas of Soviet Russia, tormented by the civil war, and tens of thousands of orphaned children are trying to survive as best they can: they wander, steal... but most of all they are cold and hungry. Train commander Geyev and Commissar Belaya evacuate five hundred such children from Kazan to Samarkand... A long, arduous train ride awaits them from the Volga region through the Kazakh steppes and the Kizil-Kum desert, and while sometimes with horrible cruelty, sometimes still remaining in the people who survived the previous bloody battles or they meet a humanity that revives at the sight of children and even incites them to self-sacrificing actions, we get to know a multitude of human destinies: refugee peasants, Chekists, Cossacks - and also the special world of little vagabonds: their language, the entanglements of their spiritual life, their superstitions, their hopes.