Lizka and Her Men

A kaleidoscopic chronicle of life in perestroika Russia - wonderfully ironic and light.

Lizka is a young Russian living an unexciting life in a backward rural town. After her first fleeting and unsatisfactory sexual experience sets the locals tongues wagging, she moves to a larger town G in search of a new life and love. As she moves from one relationship to another, her men include a local con-man, a powerful Party official (later the local governor), a trolleybus driver, a belligerent young army veteran and, ultimately, a poet, the narrator of the story, who finally takes her away from G. In keeping with our heroine s own character, and in the tradition of the great Russian writers, Ikonnikov draws out the tragic-comic nature of his characters and their obsessions, and presents the reader with a wonderfully detailed picture of provincial Russian characters, habits, opinions and desires.