Happy Pills

13 hrs. 14 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Svetlana Shenbrunn

Narrator Elena Chubarova

Description

The book is based on real facts and authentic letters and diaries. The heroine of the book, Nina Syunnangord, wife of a publisher from a small Swedish town and mother of three little sons, was born in Leningrad—several months before the Great War, and therefore before the Great Siege. Then she was called Nina Tikhvina.

Leaving Russia, she seemed to find a different life. In the present, prosperous and quiet existence, memories of childhood in the overcrowded postwar Petrograd communal apartment do not leave her. Youth is playful, self-confident, and carefree! How fun it was for her to go on student trips and not notice that along the tourist routes—just a couple of steps from them—bones of her executed grandmother and grandfather, her cousins and brothers were rotting in the Belarusian swamps…

Then in her life came the Negev desert in Israel—in Russia, Nina compares, at best it would have amounted to a dry steppe. Somewhere there—her grown son, a witness to her former life. The action of the novel shifts from Europe—to Israel—and then to Saint Petersburg. The spirit of geniuses who lived and created in Petersburg still rules here. But as much as Dostoyevsky tried to depict the inevitability of humiliation and insult, people do not want to believe it. A person needs hope…

But where are those PILLS OF HAPPINESS that will allow you to forget what seems to haunt in the darkness of a winter day, in the haze of a twilight mind?