The Prussian Bride (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781903517062)

'One day I found out that my little native town used to be called not Znamensk but Wehlau. Germans had lived here. This had been East Prussia. Then they were deported. A ten-twenty-thirty-year layer of Russian life trembled on a seven-hundred-year foundation about which I knew nothing. So the child began to invent.'

The resettling of the Kaliningrad Region (former East Prussia) with Soviet citizens occurred a few years before Yuri Buida's birth in 1954. 'Not a single person was left who could say of East Prussian space and time: "That's me"'. Buida's motley characters - war wounded, bereaved wives, madmen, fearless adolescents and a resurrected minister of state - inhabit a dislocated reality, a dream-like world of double identities and miraculous occurrences. Buida's skill at merging playful fantasy with bitter experience gives to his writing a haunting vividness and intensity.

The Prussian Bride is a treasure house of myth and narrative exuberance, with stories that swing between outrageous invention and often tragic reality. It is one of the most exciting discoveries of post-Soviet literature and a worthy winner of a prestigious Apollon Grigoriev award in Russia: it was also shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize.

Author: Yuri Buida
ISBN-10: 1903517060
ISBN-13: 9781903517062
Publisher: Dedalus
Language: English
Published: 11/01/2002
Pages: 375
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 7.76h x 5.02w x 1.15d
Award: Rossica Translation Prize - Winner