Category: Achter de donkere wouden

My son would have had his birthday today

Achter de donkere wouden / love / Through The Dark Woods

7th March 2025

by Aleksandr Skorobogatov · Published 7th March 2025

My son would have had his birthday today

My son would have had his birthday today. This photo of him, taken by my youngest brother Lesha long ago at my son’s grandparents’ in Batumi (Georgia), survived a fire, and it survived the...

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THE NEW YORK TIMES:
The novel elegantly recalls the great poets of delirium and madness that continue to be the reason people around the world turn to Russian literature: Dostoyevsky, Gogol. (…) Russian Gothic is a powerfully airless, demented little book whose fever proceeds with unbearable lucidity, both of prose and of mind… A lambent portrait of madness.
— Boris Fishman, The New York Times

THE TELEGRAPH:
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Part-Gogol, part-Nabokov and thoroughly magnificent… Russian Gothic has been heralded as an early masterpiece of post-Soviet literature — a wonderfully, startlingly disconcerting read.
— Francesca Peacock, The Telegraph (5 out of 5 stars)

THE SUNDAY TIMES:
Russian Gothic joins the tradition of tales told from the perspective of unhinged narrators, from Gogol’s Diary of a Madman (1835) to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) (…) All the more chilling in light of the conscripts being sent en masse to fight in Ukraine (…) Skorobogatov’s complex psychological portrait is riveting.
— Mia Levitin, The Sunday Times

LE FIGARO:
A grand Russian novel where the hero is a husband tortured by the demons of jealousy. With this beautiful tragic novel, Skorobogatov has carved a place for himself in the grand Russian tradition.
— Astrid de Larminat, Le Figaro

BIG ISSUE:
The black, droll humour; the hyperbolic expression, both in dialogue and the author’s prose; the bold assumption that is the Russian writer’s job to take on profound truths about humanity’s successes and failures; the seamless switches from short no-nonsense exposition to grand sighs and world-weary cries. The proliferation of melodramatic exclamation marks! If this is the territory in which your own dark soul thrives (mine certainly does), Russian Gothic will be Prokofiev to your ears.
— Jane Graham, Big Issue

MORE PRAISE FOR RUSSIAN GOTHIC :

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Russian Gothic is an exceptionally fascinating and accomplished novel that skillfully intertwines reality, dream, delirium and madness.
— Marnix Verplanke, Knack Focus (5 out of 5 stars)

A Russian Edgar Allan Poe story, written in a sublime and breathtaking way.
— Lektuurgids

A short and grand novel about an obsessive jealousy which leads to madness, in the tradition of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman.
— Jean-Claude Vantroyen, Le Soir

A dark masterpiece.
— Femina Magazine

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My son would have had his birthday today
Mijn nieuwe stuk vandaag in De Standaard:
Happy Valentine’s Day, my Love!

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