A brilliant novel by the prizewinning American writer Doctorow about jazz and jazz people looked to Vasily Aksenov like a worthy challenge—so that he could translate it into Russian in the only way Aksenov could. And now before us is “Ragtime”—a brilliant novel.
But whose is it—Doctorow’s or Aksenov’s? American or Russian? And does that matter at all? What matters is that you have in your hands an incredibly interesting book that has become a classic and a bestseller on both sides of the ocean.