The Witness

The main hero of “The Witness” is a captain—someone who managed to fight in the USSR’s final years—an observer in a world that rose from the ruins of an empire. He wanders dispassionately across Russia and other countries, meets people from the past, falls in love, loses his beloved, finds her again—only to lose her once more, and now forever. “The Witness” refers to one of the best books about the Civil War: Victor Shklovsky’s “A Sentimental Journey,” and the war becomes an equal character in this book. It is also a novel about the nineties—the time not only of a huge upswing, but of great disorientation. It is a book about an era that managed to turn into a myth.