[Tales of the Last Days 02] • The Matiushin Case

The Matiushin Case is among the most powerful recent works of Russian fiction. Deriving, like Captain of the Steppe (2013, And Other Stories), from Oleg Pavlov's experience of the declining Soviet Union, it follows Matiushin, a young man damaged by brutality at home and then in the army. Drawing on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "labor-camp writing," Oleg Pavlov builds a unique tension between the horrors of conscription and the dreamlike, timeless mode of his writing. Matiushin's "crime and punishment" thus emerge with compelling inevitability; the victim turns killer. This hell is above all psychological—and no less universal than those of Dante or Dostoevsky.

Oleg Pavlov is one of the most highly-regarded contemporary Russian writers. He won the Russian Booker Prize in 2002 and the Solzhenitsyn Prize in 2012.