A novel by Aleksey Varlamov, winner of the “Big Book” prize, available in audio format!
Aleksey Varlamov is a writer of prose, a philologist, and the rector of the A.M. Gorky Literary Institute. Author of the novels “My Soul, Pavel,” “Loch,” and biographies of Mikhail Prishvin, Alexander Grin, Aleksey Tolstoy, Grigory Rasputin, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrey Platonov, and Vasily Shukshin. Laureate of the “BIG BOOK” prize, the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize, and the Patriarchal Literary Prize.
“There are works that don’t spread out into phrases, but stay with you in the fullness of their meaning. Such is Aleksey Varlamov’s novel ‘The Thought Wolf.’ He loves the word, not the sentence. This difference was well sensed by Russian classics.”
Yevgeny Vodolazkin
In his novel “The Thought Wolf,” Aleksey Varlamov calls it a “personal attempt to speak about the Silver Age.” The writer chose one of the sharpest moments in Russian history—“aabysses on the edge”: from the summer of 1914 to the winter of 1918. In it live and die heroes in whom recognizable real figures are hinted: Grigory Rasputin, Vasily Rozanov, Mikhail Prishvin, the scandalous ex-ieromonk Iliodor and the sectarian Shchetinkin; real and fictional events mix together. The characters love—very in the Russian way, with fatal passion—and argue and philosophize about the nature of the Russian person, permissiveness, Nietzsche, the future of the country, and… the thought wolf—a terrifying, charming beast that invaded Russia and became the cause of its troubles…