![]() ![]() In the second chapter we meet Galina, the granddaughter of the disappeared dancer, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fact that Roman is innocent of that particular crime is beside the point as Marra so deftly illustrates throughout these stories, “You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else’s.” Dutifully, that is, until he’s arrested for being in cahoots with a Polish spy ring led by a prima ballerina. There’s Roman Markin of the opening story, the failed painter turned stooge for the Stalin era’s Soviet Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation who dutifully airbrushes the faces of dissidents, counterrevolutionaries and other “enemies of the people” out of historical artwork and photographs. ![]() Scattered throughout nine tightly interconnected vignettes that read more like a novel than a collection of short stories, a complicated web of careworn lives unspools in Siberia, Chechnya and St. Like his deeply affecting debut, which took place mostly in beleaguered Chechnya after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Marra sets his latest endeavor - “The Tsar of Love and Techno” - in a bruised and oppressive Russia. ![]()
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