The Other

Yuri Mamleev, the founder of the genre of metaphysical realism, is a very mysterious writer. His books are populated by vampires, extrasensory people, ghosts, maniac-killers, and other strange characters. Reading Mamleev is like peering into an abyssal hell. But that’s not what earned him world fame. The writer knows something that an ordinary person either doesn’t even suspect or is afraid to think about. In the novel “The Other,” Mamleev investigates the spiritual situation of modern Russia. This is a new stage of the famous writer’s work: in his perspective, from now on, not only the mystical aspects of existence, but also the social ones.
Yuri Mamleev’s biography contains almost all the recognizable signs of an artist’s fate in a totalitarian society: seclusion, writing in a drawer, exile, and life in emigration. Mamleev’s prose is an astonishing blend of grotesque and deep philosophical thought: shocking, outrageous texts with elements of mysticism.
The most aphoristic definition of Mamleev’s prose is “Literature of the end of the world.”
Life is rather horrifying: it’s short… True literature has the effect of catharsis—its outcome is a mysterious cleansing—even if the life described in it is depicted as filth.