Geografiia odinochnogo vystrela [A Bullet’s Itinerary], an 800-page long trilogy first published in 2000, took Kurkov seven years to complete. It is set in 1928-1977 in Soviet Russia, or rather in an alternative absurdist version of it, which is ruled, for a large part of the book, by Mikhail Kalinin (who changes his name to Tverin, after the city of Tver’, which is exactly the opposite of what really happened), while Stalin is not even mentioned. A Bullet’s Itinerary is a brave attempt to merge the saint’s life genre with the epic novel. The book consists of three parts which cannot stand on their own. Once again with Kurkov, we are dealing with several slowly evolving parallel …
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Citation: Rogatchevski, Andrei. "Geografiia odinochnogo vystrela". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 October 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=31910, accessed 21 November 2024.]