The Gravilet Tsesarevich

11 hrs. 41 min.

Language Russian

Author Vyacheslav Rybakov

Narrator Konstantin Kostetsky

Description

An intense plot-driven, yet deeply psychological novel with a detective storyline, formally belonging to the genre of alternative history; at the same time, it’s both utopia and anti-utopia. The action takes place in our days, but in a world where there were no Franco-Prussian War, no Russo-Japanese War, no revolutions, and no 20th-century world wars. Russia is a pluralist monarchy. The main character is Colonel of state security of Russia, Prince Trubetskoy, by faith—a communist. Investigating, on the personal order of the monarch, a mysterious catastrophe that occurred with a gravilite of the heir to the Russian throne—an heir whose job was to lead the Russian part of a Russian-American program for preparing an expedition to Mars—Trubetskoy discovers our world, artificially created in an underground bunker at the end of the 1960s by several fanatics in order to breed a new, super-aggressive breed of people. But most people in the real world have spiritual doubles in that terrifying bunker—specifically, Trubetskoy finds his own, modest…