Description:
'One day I found out that my little native town used to be called not Znamensk but Wehlau. Germans had lived here. This had been East Prussia. Then they were deported. A ten-twenty-thirty-year layer of Russian life trembled on a seven-hundred-year foundation about which I knew nothing. So the child began to invent.'
The resettling of the Kaliningrad Region (former East Prussia) with Soviet citizens occurred a few years before Yuri Buida's birth in 1954. 'Not a single person was left who could say of East Prussian space and time: "That's me"'. Buida's motley characters - war wounded, bereaved wives, madmen, fearless adolescents and a resurrected minister of state - inhabit a dislocated reality, a dream-like world of double identities and miraculous occurrences. Buida's skill at merging playful fantasy with bitter experience gives to his writing a haunting vividness and intensity.
The Prussian Bride is a treasure house of myth and narrative exuberance, with stories that swing between outrageous invention and often tragic reality. It is one of the most exciting discoveries of post-Soviet literature and a worthy winner of a prestigious Apollon Grigoriev award in Russia: it was also shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize.
Brief description: Yuri Buida is one of the foremost contemporary Russian writers. He was born in 1954 and is of mixed Russian, Polish, Belorussian and Ukranian descent. The question of identity runs through his fiction which tends towards mythmaking and the surreal. His novel The Zero Train was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize in 1993. His short story cycle The Prussian Bride won the prestigious Apollon Grigoriev Prize in 1999. Oliver Ready's translation for Dedalus was awarded the inaugural Russian Translation Prize in 2005.