Irina Muravyova “Angel’s Day”

Alexander Kabakov is the winner of the Apollon Grigoriev and the Big Book awards, the author of novels and collections, including The Russians Will Not Come, The Fugitive. Diary of an Unknown (AST: Astrel, 2010, 2009), Moscow Tales (Vagrius, 2005).

“The new novel by Irina Muravyova “The Day of the Angel” is wonderful. The historical memory shown in it is beautiful. This is not a memory for details – this is knowledge of which country you live in. Irina talks wonderfully about Moscow in the 1930s, describes the famous ball at the American ambassador’s, which served as the basis for Bulgakov’s ball at Satan’s. But most importantly, the novel touches upon the theme of cooperation between the liberal Western intelligentsia and the Great Terror. To recall how all these Romains Rollands and Lyons Feuchtwangers came here during open trials and then wrote about what happiness reigns here, no small civic courage is needed. For one reason: if you write how the leftist intelligentsia caved in, you will never be transferred, because the Western intelligentsia is still leftist. Muravyova, thank God, does not give a damn about this. She describes the fate of an American journalist from the New York Times, who lived in Moscow. This is a real person. He was a hired journalist for the Stalinist Kremlin. In 1960, he was retroactively stripped of the Pulitzer Prize he had won for his false reporting. At the same time, as always with Irina, this is a book about fatal love. About the breaking, pathological subordination of a woman to an unworthy man. And it’s also very well written, technically refined. Sometimes prose becomes rhythmic and turns into blank verse.