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The Vital Needs Of The Dead
What needs might the dead have? Our loved ones stay with us after they’ve gone. Love, death and memory breathe in unison in the novel by Igor Sakhnovsky.
The Vital Needs of the Dead is a tender coming-of-age story set in the provinces of the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century. At the center of this story, praised by Russian critics for its blend of realism...more
The Vital Needs of the Dead is a tender coming-of-age story set in the provinces of the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century. At the center of this story, praised by Russian critics for its blend of realism...more
Paperback, 162 pages
Published
August 2012
by Glagoslav Publications
(first published 1999)
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My first thought with Vital Needs of the dead when I started reading it was that not everyone is going to understand this book. As I continued reading I continued to feel that way. For those born in a privileged western world that have not had to deal with the experiences of something like Soviet run Russia they cannot always identify with what is going on.
Now I am one of those who was born in the Western world but I have done a lot of reading of this era and like to think I can connect with wha...more
Now I am one of those who was born in the Western world but I have done a lot of reading of this era and like to think I can connect with wha...more
This book was a major disappointment. The writing often came off as the kind of badly translated Russian one might get from Google Translate. I found myself more than once reading it in the Russian accent of a Soviet character from a Cold War-era spy movie. As for the subject of the writing, it was, at least for me, entirely unrelatable. Perhaps if I had been born and raised in the Soviet Union, I might have been able to identify a bit more. As it was, there was little in any character, place, o...more
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This book was interesting. It's written in a realistic style, and follows the coming-of-age story of Gosha Sidelnikov. Gosha, as we find out after a few chapters, is developmentally slow, so we see the world through his particularly naïve eyes. He is closer to his grandmother Rosa than to his mother, and after Rosa's death, she continues to visit him in his dreams, providing him with guidance as he grows into the world.
The story is interesting, but just that. I did not find it compelling. 2 sta...more
The story is interesting, but just that. I did not find it compelling. 2 sta...more
This book was hit-and-miss for me. I really liked some of the visuals and the way they were described by the author as well as some of the relationships and their dynamics that felt both interesting and real to me. Yet, overall, I found most of the novel to be pointless. There are several themes running concurrently at different times without any real central theme at any one time to give it all meaning. It doesn't work as a coming-of-age story, a story about youth in Soviet Russia, or as a stor...more
Review removed due to Amazon's acquisition of Goodreads.
Dec 05, 2012
Abby Cember
marked it as to-read
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Russian language profile at: Игорь Сахновский
Igor Sakhnovsky studied Philology at Ural State University, and went on to serve as scientific and chief editor at the Academy of Sciences, as well as directing the journal, Book Club. He has been published in a number of leading literary journals, both Russian and foreign. His novel, The Vital Needs of the Dead, was published in 1999 in the journal New...more
More about Igor Sakhnovsky...
Igor Sakhnovsky studied Philology at Ural State University, and went on to serve as scientific and chief editor at the Academy of Sciences, as well as directing the journal, Book Club. He has been published in a number of leading literary journals, both Russian and foreign. His novel, The Vital Needs of the Dead, was published in 1999 in the journal New...more
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