So my first hand impressions of Pushkin are, sadly, not good. My inability to understand Russian makes this, sadly, impossible. I’m given to understand that he is a more satisfying if you read his poetry in the original Russian.

As it happens, though, I had read Puskin’s Tales of Belkin which, whilst interesting, didn’t do a great deal for me. I have read some prose fiction written during Soviet times (mostly the obvious stuff Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and their ilk) but my wider knowledge of Russian literature is a little more limited. Unfortunately, for me, these are areas of Russian literature with which I am unfamiliar. The Slynx draws on Russia’s literary tradition including Pushkin, Lermontov and Pasternak. This provides some narrative thrust to the novel – Benedikt, though ignorant, doesn’t wish to remain so and is keen to read as much as he can. Limited ownership of pre-Blast books means that the leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe, is able to pass off great works of literature as his own and to claim responsibility for the creation of the few technological devices that the society possesses. As a child of the Blast, Benedikt is mostly ignorant of the past, though his work does tend to bring him into contact with dangerous ideas. Seen through the eyes of Benedikt, a transcriber of old books, the novel examines the past of Russia, including its art, politics, culture and history.

Although much of what the Oldeners remember is garbled (this provides some of the satirical humour in the novel). Those who were born after the event suffer “Consequences” (mutations) and are often mocked by their elders for their lack of civilisation and decorum. They are alive and unchanged from an event which happened 200 years prior to the setting of the novel. There are those, the Oldeners, who were alive before the Blast who appear to be immortal. Tatyana Tolstoya’s The Slynx imagines a post-apocalyptic Russia, destroyed in a nuclear holocaust (“the Blast”) which has reduced to the world to an ignorant and technologically degenerate dystopia.

The slynx book