The Dark Past of the Man of the Future

A gripping journey through 1993 Russian reality

Evgeny Chizhov is a prose writer, twice a finalist of the “Big Book,” a laureate of the “Vets” award of the Writers’ Union of Moscow (“Translation from the undertext”), a finalist of the Andrey Bely Prize and the “NOS” award, and laureate of “Yasnaya Polyana” (“Gathering the Field”).

In the novel “The Dark Past of the Man of the Future,” combining the ease of plot-driven storytelling with the techniques of modernist literature, the author describes the relationship of the “little man” with the Big Steel and the Big History—particularly with the history of the stormy Moscow events of October 1993. The central character works as a stagehand in an opera theater. The new phantom of the opera spreads its phantasmality everywhere, taking away weight from objects and reducing life to unreality.