Zakhar Prilepin

Patologii

The Pathologists
Novel. Ad Marginem. Moscow 2006. 250 pages

awards:

2005 Inspire Paris
2005 Literaturnaya Rossia
2005 Roman-Gazeta (Debut)
2008 Rusophonia France (Joelle Dublanchet, French translator of Pathologies)

Foreign rights:

Bulgaria, France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain

Egor Tashevsky is serving with a special unit in Chechnya. However, Egor is not prepared for this war. His psyche is fragile, his courage lacking, war is not part of his idea of normality. He finds that he is nothing more than curious when the first bodies lie before him, he catches himself fantasizing about deserting and about illness which would save him from this deployment, he has the hysterical desire to sing out loud or to rock in a cradle while he is waiting for the enemy; he finds himself on the edge of insanity. He is also madly in love with Dasha. A frenzied love which leads to acts of insanity on the part of the jealous Egor, as insane as the young hero’s angry outrage against God, as insane as the gruesome episodes of war. While the flashbacks to a childhood as an orphan boy and the unhappy love for Dasha make a human being out of the soldier figure, the war episodes lead the novel to its conclusion like a heavy and unstoppable boulder rolling down a mountainside.

This is not an ideological novel, it does not analyse the reasoning of the warmongers and wartime profiteers on either side. It is far more shocking, realistic and straightforward.

Prilepin in an interview: "When I went to Chechnya for the first time in 1996, I was aggressive and confrontational – no, I didn’t wish death upon all Chechens but I allowed myself to be taken in by imperial ideas. Now, almost ten years later, I am overcome by uncontrollable anger at all of those who are anti-Chechnya, the imperialists and the warmongers. It is a disgraceful, terrible and abysmal war. I have remained conservative, am still on the side of the state, but I consider myself sane and do not want my country sacrificing the lives of young people in the name of a minor but very protracted war which cannot be won.”