The Steamer Babelon

“They say: scratch the prose and you’ll find the author. I discovered the author of ‘The Babbelon Steamboat’ many years ago by coming upon his, in many ways, autobiographical novel ‘Frau Shram.’ That’s when I appreciated the quality of his prose—the unhurried pace, a distinct aroma, and vivid colorfulness. The new novel by Afanasiy Mamedov, ‘The Babbelon Steamboat,’ is in the old way characteristically unusual, but now it carries a different kind of information storm: the time in which the action of the novel unfolds still raises many questions. Afanasiy Mamedov is at home in the historical material he works with—like a fish in water. He himself admits that ‘The Babbelon Steamboat’ is inspired by family chronicles. And I tend to believe him: in this novel, too, I effortlessly find the author and again confirm that this is what makes his prose real.” — David Markish (writer)

“Times of big historical novels are gone, but the task of understanding the past, working with memory, and imagining what has been irretrievably lost is more relevant than ever. Compact, multi-layered, and as if condensed into ‘The Babbelon Steamboat,’ Afanasiy Mamedov’s work is an attempt to return to the untold mysteries of the past through the art of imagination. The novel leans on family history; with a pair of plastically precise strokes, it outlines the catastrophic signs of the era and reveals to the reader an entirely different history—unknown from textbooks—complete with its forgotten heroes and villains. Nested within one another, like Chinese boxes, framed by and framing stories, they swirl around the same tragic events of the first post-revolutionary decades, recreating the South Caucasus and the Polish–Belarusian–Lithuanian borderlands each time from a new angle—adding missing details one by one and offering us different ways to enter the space of Babylon, drifting toward inevitable destruction. And in the end, it is the reader who must put this mosaic together.” — Madina Tlostanova (writer, Doctor of Philology, Professor at Linköping University (Sweden))