Sergei Lebedev

The mystical laundress at the center of this novel is obsessed with purity. Her task is formidable as she stands guard over a sealed shaft at a Ukrainian coal mine that hides terrible truths. The bodies of dead Jews lying in its depths seem to attract still more present-day crimes. Acclaimed Russian author Sergei Lebedev portrays a ghostly realm riven by lust and fear just as the Kremlin invades the same part of Ukraine occupied by the Wehrmacht in World War II. Then corpses rain from the sky when a jetliner is shot down overhead, scattering luxury goods along with the mortal remains. Eerie coincidences and gruesome discoveries fill this riveting exploration of an uncanny place where the geography exudes violence, and where the sins of the past are never all that in the past. Lebedev, who has won international praise for his soul-searching prose and unflinching examination of history’s evils, shines light on the fault line where Nazism met Soviet communism, evolving into the new fascism of today’s Russia.

 

Praise for Sergei Lebedev’s earlier books:

“A tour de force—exquisite and gripping, finely translated, fiction that pulls you into the beautiful and brutal service of imagining and understanding the human realities of modern Russia, a series of tales meticulously crafted and deeply imagined.”—Philippe Sands, author of East West Street, The Ratline, and The Last Colony

“One of Russia’s most prominent contemporary writers, Lebedev, 41, has been hailed for a series of novels that hold a mirror up to Russia's blighted past. A former geologist, he chips away at the deep strata of his country's 20th century history, the seams of trauma concealed by a state-sanctioned campaign of oblivion.”—The Financial Times

“A geologist by training, Lebedev’s fiction excavates what lies beneath: the inner lives of earlier generations, buried under layers of official myth and self-deceit … the strange dualism that allows loving fathers to serve tyranny by day and to tuck their children up at night.”—The Guardian

 

Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. Lebedev is a poet, essayist, and journalist. His novels have been translated into twenty languages and have received great acclaim in the English-speaking world. The New York Review of Books has hailed Lebedev as “the best of Russia’s younger generation of writers.”

 

THE LADY OF THE MINE

by Sergei Lebedev

Translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis

New Vessel Press—Fiction—January 7, 2025