In Dmitriev’s novel “Bay of Joy,” an attempt is made at a large-scale panorama of today. Many episodic characters of different ages, from different layers of society— from an elderly ex-vertukhay to an oligarch, from a cynical special-forces soldier to a tender, straightforward young woman; all of them on a sunny summer day off gather at the Pyrogovo reservoir near Moscow to swim, go fishing, and eat shashlik. Even the main character, a man with the surname Stremukhin, is set on shashlik. And even that detail bothers quite a bit: in life, such surnames are encountered very rarely, whereas in bad, dusty-smelling novels—around and everywhere.
Finalist of the Russian Booker Prize (2007).