Istemi

By Alexei Nikitin

As the USSR enters its final decade, a group of bored science students in Kiev devise a strategy game in which each 'ruler' competes in Orwellian permanent war. Alerted - by whom? - to the subversive nature and Ukrainian nationalism inherent in the game, the KGB becomes suspicious and pulls them all in for questioning. Though eventually released, they are now marked men whose lives are overrun by wider events - resulting variously in a hellish tour of duty in Afghanistan, incarceration in an asylum and mindless bureaucratic drudgery. As Ukraine negotiates the post-Soviet capitalist free-for-all twenty years later, one of the group, Davidov, aka Istemi, receives an email with a familiar ultimatum attached . . . Brilliantly revealing how a seemingly innocent pursuit can have unforeseen and far-reaching effects, Istemi is a wildly inventive novel exploring the curious banality deep in the heart of a paranoid totalitarian state.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
• Release date: Nov 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780720614626

Reviews for Istemi

[clara53_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bizarre sequence of events and intentions play havoc with the lives of the protagonist and his four friends as the story jumps from 1984 to 2004 (back and forth) in Kiev, Ukraine. The random mental game (what the KGB suspiciously called "the game with political implications" that "quantitatively simulated the partition of the Soviet Union") that the four friends invented and played while students in Kiev University, resulted in serious consequences. This is the plot. But for me, the plot didn't take me in as much as the glimpses into the snippets of reality as Ukraine transitioned from perestroika/glasnost to a completely new existence as a separate country. In the second part of the book, as the main character roams about Kiev streets, the matter-of-fact tone becomes more lyrical and contemplative, which makes him pronounce: "Come what may, the force of life has always been abundant in Kiev hills".... I think the translator Anne Marie Jackson did a very good job - for it's not that easy to translate Russian authors when one is not a native Russian speaker.