We Went Out for a Smoke for 17 Years

Stories about love, about betrayal, about loneliness, about travel, and about the hopeless experience of fighting a world that will still beat you.

Mikhail Elizarov is a prose writer and musician, a winner of the “Russian Booker” prize. He is the author of the novels “Pasternak” and “The Librarian,” and of short prose collections “Nails” (a shortlist of the “National Bestseller” prize) and “We went for a smoke for 17 years” (a shortlist of the NOC prize).

“Elizarov is both his own direction, and his evaluation criteria, and God, and king, and hero. He is distinctly paradoxical and aggressively provocative. His lyrical hero is a bold, handsome bodybuilder—but at the same time helpless and defenseless, like a child. From brutality to tenderness there is only one step, and he keeps making it constantly, so he is forever ‘led and contorts,’ as N. S. Leskov put it.

Each story in the collection is good in its own way. They are about love, about betrayal, about loneliness, about travel, and about the hopeless experience of fighting a world that will still beat you” (Pavel Basinsky).

“My appearance hasn’t really changed for the last seventeen years. Since that very September, when I was shown a warlike ‘kin,’ the special forces of the mirror world—I’ve been wearing only black. In memory of the meeting. The last thing I’d want is to look like a dressed-up samurai from ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ a peasant with a stolen lineage, armor from another man’s shoulder. Still, they had enough heart to die with dignity. I’m not sure about my heart…”