Present Past
“Ghosts are not born by themselves. They are born of a silent conscience. They are as real as the ignored knowledge of crimes and the refusal to accept real responsibility. They are the distorted voice of the dead turned into mystical images. The voice of unwanted witnesses.”
A Present Past is a collection of short stories that brings to vivid life a post-Soviet world haunted by the secrets and crimes of its past. It features a judge overcome by the weight of his ruling, the stories within the old Soviet cemeteries, discovered objects that transport us to another time and the documents of the KGB. Seamlessly blending history with fiction, politics with individualism, reality with magic, the eleven tales explore the unacknowledged crimes of the Soviet Union and Russian State, and show how the devastating sins of the past pervade the present.
Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. Lebedev is a poet, essayist and journalist. His novels include Oblivion, Untraceable, The Year of the Comet and The Goose Fritz, and have been translated into many languages and received great acclaim in the English-speaking world. The New York Review of Books has hailed Lebedev as "the best of Russia's younger generation of writers."
Antonina W. Bouis is one of the leading translators of Russian literature working today. She has translated over eighty works from authors such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Sakharov, Sergei Dovlatov, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Bouis, previously Executive Director of the Soros Foundation in the former USSR, lives in New York City.