Andrei Astvatsaturov

Lyudi v golom People in Their Birthday Suits
Novel. Ad Marginem Press. Moscow 2008. 303 pages
Foreign rights: Finland

No. 3 on the list of the most-sold books at MOSKVA, Moscow’s largest book supermarket, for the whole of summer 2009

If you can have people in white, people in blue(-collars), then why not people in their birthday suits? This is the question which schoolboy Andrey asks, earning himself bad marks again of course. To his parents’ despair he often hangs around with the wrong crowd as well. The likes of him are never going to amount to much. But then he does in fact go on to become a professor. Only his is not the worthwhile engineering profession, but moneyless literature instead. Other colleagues in the humanities make it into television at least and earn money. Not our hero: a loser, one for the books? No, one better: Petersburg’s Woody Allen.
The self-depreciating confessions of a Petersburg intellectual "with thick glasses" introduce the reader to the Bohemian side of the Petersburg intelligentsia. Their souls and mental states are enacted and revealed in the author’s persona, with a satirically sharp pen and unsurpassable humour. Already the cult book of a whole generation and anything but a novel.

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