The Aviator

A man wakes up in a hospital bed. He has no idea who he is, where he is, or how he came to be there. The only information that the doctor shares with his patient before urging him to write down every thought and feeling that comes to mind is the young man’s name: Innokenty Petrovich Platonov.
As Innokenty starts to write, out pours a kaleidoscope of images, faces and events, weaving the story of a young man in Russia in the early twentieth century, through the turbulence of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. From childhood memories of summers in the family dacha playing aviators with his cousin to the family’s compulsory move to a communal flat in the city and beyond, Innokenty gradually builds up a vivid picture of his former life. There is just one question remaining: how is he able to remember the start of the twentieth century, when the pills by his bedside were made in 1999?

Eugene Vodolazkin was born in Kiev and has worked in the department of Old Russian Literature at Pushkin House since 1990. He is an expert in medieval Russian history and folklore. His debut novel Solovyov and Larionov (Oneworld, 2018) was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely Prize and Russia’s National Big Book Award. Laurus, his second novel but the first to be translated into English, won the National Big Book Award and the Yasnaya Polyana Award and was shortlisted for the National Bestseller Prize, the Russian Booker Prize and the New Literature Award, and has been translated into eighteen languages. He lives in St Petersburg.

Lisa Hayden’s translations from the Russian include Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus, which won the Read Russia Award in 2016 and was also shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize along with her translation of Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina. Her blog, Lizok’s Bookshelf, examines contemporary Russian fiction. She lives in Maine, USA.