A School for Fools

One of the key works of late 20th-century Russian prose. The novel is created in a rare experimental form: there is no familiar linear plot or clearly constructed composition. The story is told through the voice of a hero with a split consciousness; his narration is built from clashes of opposites, a flow of impressions, sudden associations, fragments from newspapers, and scraps of conversations he absorbs and turns into his personal “sanctuary.” Returning in memory to childhood and school in a specialized school for “special” children, he simultaneously describes and makes sense of a reality where the past constantly mixes with the present. Through an endless internal struggle with himself and the world, he lives everything as if engaged in an unending inner debate, like a dialogue with himself. Trying to enter adulthood, the hero faces both joy and loss, love and death.

Sasha Sokolov is a Russian writer, poet, and journalist often called the “Russian Salinger” and considered an inheritor of the Nabokov tradition.

In audio format, thanks to the work of actor and director Aleksei Agranovich, the unusual structure of the text and its polyphony were conveyed carefully.

From reviews of the novel:
“Charming, tragic, and most touching book,”—Vladimir Nabokov
“An exquisite vertical prose full of light-infused echoes, a captivating bend of gracefully curved words, and sometimes blissfully inarticulate awkwardness,”—Mikhail Berg
“His Russian is flexible and rich in surprising ways. It’s as if he discovered in it such little corners, dusted off such shades and flows that we hadn’t noticed,”—Tatiana Tolstaya

Performer: Aleksei Agranovich
Illustration and design: Yuliya Stotskaya
Recording: Audio Publishing House VIMBO
Producers: Vadim Buk, Mikhail Litvakov