Collectors of Silence

9 hrs. 13 min.

Language Russian

Narrator Evgeniy Tkachuk

Description

Dmitry Filipov’s novel “The Collectors of Silence” has every chance of becoming a benchmark text for the emerging body of new Russian military literature born from the SVO—what, by analogy with “lieutenant prose,” could be called “the prose of volunteers.” Filipov went to war as an established writer and will return as a classic. “The Collectors of Silence” testify to the artist’s significant potential: here you can see a carefully planned architecture of the text, and a logically built composition, and a volatile mixture of epic and reportage. The bright and convincing main character, believable figures, tension and drive—sometimes, especially in the second part, whose chronotope is the assault on Avdeevka, the book resembles rapidly assembled shots from a film crew that knows it could die at any moment and that this material is absolutely essential to leave behind. The events of the Great Patriotic War and the war in Ukraine stand side by side—and go straight into eternity. The exposition of two realities is also crucial: the war and the well-fed, old, sleepy everyday life of Russian megacities. Literary analogues of “The Collectors of Silence” include Isaac Babel’s “Red Cavalry,” Alexander Terekhon’s “The Germans,” and Zakhar Prilepin’s “Militia Romance.”