Sergei Kaledin pulled out his lucky ticket at the age of 37, when Novy Mir published his story The Humble Cemetery (1987). This story about Soviet funeral ritual workers, seen through the eyes of a cemetery watchman, was written in 1979 without any hope of being published.
Sergei Kaledin pulled out his lucky ticket at the age of 37, when Novy Mir published his story The Humble Cemetery (1987). This story about Soviet funeral ritual workers, seen through the eyes of a cemetery watchman, was written in 1979 without any hope of being published. He immediately found his angle and type of writing – not to invent anything and keep the picture alive. Lies will corrode the text like mold. It is not surprising that during the years of perestroika, Kaledin was one of the few who wrote about modern Russia, and Marshal Yazov perceived his “Stroybat” (1989) as “a knife in the back of the Soviet army.” Today Kaledin released a collection of “Black and White Cinema” – these are stories about the village near Moscow where the writer lives, about his neighbors, wives and children, about his mother and about the world. The writer continues to shoot documentaries: with a jumping camera, without editing, but so vigilantly and reliably that a trace of the hoof of time remains on its pages.
AST, Corpus, 336 p.