The Defense of Joseph Vintz

Maria Konyukova’s book can be seen both as a portrait against the backdrop of an era and as a description of an era against the backdrop of a portrait. The hero of the novel is Maria’s grandfather, who spent most of his life in the Soviet Union. Living in the Soviet empire turned a talented, intelligent nuclear physicist into a representative of a particular kind of people that the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg called “the horrified.” In the book about the life and survival of homo soveticus, the author attempts to make sense of the USSR era of the 1970s–80s—an assessment that we are only beginning to approach today. For the main character, reality was a combination of a rich, vivid life of the spirit and daily struggle for a normal existence amid total shortages and the iron curtain. The grandfather’s main dream was destined to come true: he died very old, in his own bed, and in his death avoided all the dangerous traps that the wolf of the century set for him. But at what cost…