Cremulator

At the center of the story “Cremulator” is Pyotr Nesterenko—a nobleman, an officer of World War I, and a participant in the White movement who became an NKVD agent in Paris and the first director of the Moscow crematorium. In June 1941, Nesterenko was arrested, and his story echoed the memories from his personal diaries and archival documents. Nesterenko’s life is, in many ways, a mystery—unexplained and contradictory. Following the path of the main character, Sasha Filipenko visited Saratov and Paris, Istanbul and Warsaw, finding the missing pieces of the enigma and assembling, as he puts it, “an entirely astonishing fate,” reconstructed in a literary way.