The Man Opposite

17 hrs. 21 min.

Language Russian

Author Vyacheslav Rybakov

Narrator Konstantin Kostetsky

The novel “The Man Across the Way” is a continuation of “The Hearth on the Tower,” but it can also be read as an almost independent work—although it features the same heroes who have aged by seven or eight years. “The Man Across the Way” is written in the author’s favorite genre of socio-psychological detective fiction, with events unfolding in an alternative world. The timeline here is not far from our present—this alternative world is created by the victory of the Kremlin putschists in August 1991. The action of the novel itself takes place in 1996 in a country that has preserved the pseudo-socialist system, but even more than in our reality, territorially fragmented Russia. For the sake of his son, the main character of the first novel—a scientist and idealist—who, thanks to his discovery, acquired fantastic, almost godlike powers to affect the world, is forced to begin a battle of a scale he cannot even imagine at first. To win, in the end he must replace one story with another: pull the dying Yeltsin out of a comfortable cell in a Moscow prison and seat him in the presidential chair… and finally realize in horror that the new world is not much better than the one he had to destroy. There are no perfect options in history: you can only choose among two or more evils—but you must inevitably answer for all the bad that this even smallest, but still evil, will bring with it.

1. The Hearth on the Tower (narrated by Ekaterina Mishina, Nikolay Mishin, Alexander Mishin, Margarita Mishina) 2. The Man Opposite 3. At Someone Else's Feast (narrated by Konstantin Kostetsky)