Illegible: A Novel
gandlevsk-cover
Illegible: A Novel
by Sergey Gandlevsky

Sergey Gandlevsky’s 2002 novel Illegible has a double-time focus, centering on the immediate experiences of Lev Krivorotov, a twenty-year-old poet living in Moscow in the 1970s, as well as his retrospective meditations thirty years later after most of his hopes have foundered. As the story begins, Lev is involved in a tortured affair with an older woman and consumed by envy of his more privileged friend and fellow beginner poet Nikita, one of the children of high Soviet functionaries who were known as “golden youth.”

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