Elephants All Around, Misha

“Elephants Everywhere, Misha” by Konstantin Zarubin is a tragicomic detective story about love and philosophy.

Her coat disappeared. In the hallway, on the floor, there were a few drops of blood. Vеra’s gloves lay nearby.

We meet dentist Misha eight years after that scene in the St. Petersburg communal apartment—when his beloved mysteriously vanished somewhere. A lot of water has flowed since then: Misha moved to Sweden with his wife, and his wife left him, taking their daughter. But the heart still aches with an unsolved secret. Of course, back then he decided that Vera had simply abandoned him. But what if it wasn’t that? What if something terrible happened—maybe even irreversible? And what does Misha even know about his Vera Kukushkina…?

That she was a philosophy graduate student, studied “the hard problem of consciousness,” and had a sharp nose—very beautiful in profile—and she spoke only about science. “All philosophy,” Vera said while he watched her with admiration, “is one big herd of elephants—ones you don’t notice until a certain time.”

And try to notice those elephants—because our brain constantly reconstructs memories, remembering not what happened, but what “should have” happened. How can this messed-up human consciousness of ours investigate what really happened?

The author, Konstantin Zarubin, twists and inventively moves us through other people’s memories—fake and real—with sympathetic warmth and, at the same time, a kind, good-natured mockery: he already knows which is which. And it turns out that elephants surround you, elephants surround you, Misha…