February 4th: Sergei Lebedev in Conversation With Amy Knight and Antonina W. Bouis
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Sergei Lebedev, Amy Knight and Antonina W. Bouis will discuss Lebedev’s new novel, Untraceable.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Thursday, February 4th at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.
Untraceable (New Vessel Press, 2021)
In his latest book, Untraceable, Segei Lebedev writes terrifying prose about Russia's long arm and Vladimir Putin's moves to retaliate against his critics and those who spill his nation's darkest state secrets.
The recent poisoning and arrest of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny adds a grim urgency to Untraceable, an extraordinary work that Lebedev calls a metaphysical spy novel. “Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn has Russia had a writer as obsessed as Lebedev with that country’s history or the traces it has left on the collective consciousness," writes The New York Review of Books. "Rich in textures, colors, sounds, and visual details … Lebedev is arguably the best of Russia’s younger generation of writers.”
With uncanny timing, Lebedev examines how and why Russia and the Soviet Union have developed horrendous toxins. At Untracable's center is a ruthless chemist named Professor Kalitin, obsessed with developing an absolutely deadly, undetectable and untraceable poison for which there is no antidote. But Kalitin becomes consumed by guilt over countless deaths from his Faustian pact to create the ultimate venom. In this fast-paced, genre-bending tale, Lebedev weaves suspenseful pages of stunningly beautiful prose exploring the historical trajectories of evil. From Nazi labs, Stalinist plots and the Chechen Wars, to present-day Russia, Lebedev probes the ethical responsibilities of scientists supplying modern tyrants and autocrats with ever newer instruments of retribution, destruction and control.
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 many languages and 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.”
Amy Knight is one of the West's leading scholars of the KGB and author of Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder. She has been a Soviet affairs analyst at the Library of Congress, taught at Johns Hopkins, George Washington and Carleton universities and contributes to The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement.
Antonina W. Bouis is one of the leading translators of Russian literature working today. She has translated over 80 works from authors such as Evgeny Yevtushenko, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Sakharov, Sergei Dovlatov and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Bouis, previously executive director of the Soros Foundation in the former USSR, lives in New York City.