The Sublimers

7 hrs. 54 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Yuriy Mamleyev

Narrator Grigory Perel

Description

Yury Mamleev is the founder and an acknowledged master of the genre of metaphysical realism. This is literature of the end of the world, exploring black holes and abysses that open inside human souls. “The Runaways” is a grotesque underground novel written in the 1960s that for a long time had no chance of being published in the USSR. It is a surreal, noir, and metaphysical depiction of spiritual and physical entropy. The visible world is an illusion and a kingdom of death, where spiritual quests turn into obsession. “The Runaways,” by definition of Yury Mamleev himself, is a mystery novel.

In honor of the novel’s appearance on Storytel, Yury Mamleev’s widow chose a passage from the writer’s memoirs, in which he talked about his work on “The Runaways”: “I wrote this novel in the summer of 1966, and finished it in 1968, because 1967 was a year of a kind of collapse and sagging that ‘slowed down’ my swift flight into the abyss. And as a result, when I started reading ‘The Runaways’ to people from my circle, of course they were stunned. But later it was already enough to have other overwhelming impressions from this novel. When I finished the book, it suddenly dawned on me that I myself hadn’t expected to write something like this; I was horrified. The novel is about an exceptional situation and about people who are scrambling in search of their breakthrough. There are such depths of subtext that even I myself don’t fully understand. But still, readers sometimes managed to grasp what I hadn’t seen in my own novel. That makes sense, because the novel is written by the power of some intuitive проникнення into hidden secrets of the soul. Something was happening beyond me.

As for the reaction to this novel, it was so ambiguous that if you gathered all the scattered reviews—published and especially unpublished—you’d probably end up with a substantial book, maybe no less interesting and significant than ‘The Runaways’ itself.”