Zakhar Prilepin

"Leader of his generation."
EVRIK

"Zakhar Prilepin's "Patologii" – makes me happy! Original everlasting uncompromising. Far from any critic."
VIKTOR PELEVIN

About Sankya:

"One depicts fights, chases and showdowns with the police. I have not read anything written with such vigor in a while."
VIKTOR SONKIN

About The Pathologists:

"The novel The Pathologists is the first and up to now the only war novel in which the war episodes themselves actually got to me."
VALERIA PUSTOVAYA, NOVY MIR

"Prilepin has achieved the almost impossible: showing Russia and Chechnya from the perspective of the young people who risk their lives daily… And the true value of this novel is that, even under such bloody conditions, many of its characters do not turn into animals even though they cross this invisible line."
LITERATURNAYA ROSSIYA

"The style alone is astounding – a marvellous combination of such contradictory attributes as “wonderful” and “impudent”, brought about through the close parallels between poetic images and the purely realistic and bloody every day details of war."
ROSSIISKY PISATEL

"The first real novel about this war. And it is not just about Chechnya. There are a lot of memory excerpts, flashbacks, penetrating thoughts and character descriptions – and not a hint of journalism or rhetoric."
KONSERVATOR


Zakhar Prilepin’s documentary novel about a Chechen military company, became the succès de scandale of the year. For Prilepin, the pathologies he is addressing are not only the Russian military occupation of an autonomous republic and the genocide committed there. First of all, the pathology here is the apathetic cynicism with which post-Soviet society views the inhuman brutalities committed by the out-of-control Russian army. “Pathology” is also the name of a punitive operation undertaken by a subdivision of the Russian special forces, who throughout the novel are busy with the methodical extermination of the entire male population of occupied Grozny. The novel takes the form of a diary written by the main character, who, instead of being tortured by feelings of remorse on account of the atrocities he’s taking part in, only worries about what his sexy mistress back home is getting up to in his absence. Because of its neutral colloquial language and the density of its plot, Prilepin’s novel reminds one of a medical chart, diagnosing the incurable “pathologies” of Russian society. The society suffers not from simple indifference but from a sad insensitivity. It recognizes the “pathological” injustice of the present political regime, but isn’t ready to give up its comforts in order to present a unified front of resistance. After Prilepin’s novel, it’s crystal clear: a private withdrawal from the social “pathologies” isn’t possible. But admitting the impossibility of this escape is a condition for new aesthetic and ethical breakthroughs.
Dalkey Archive Press, Centerforbookculture.org


"It is one of the rare instances in contemporary literature where talent, intellect and a soul burning with the experience of war are not spread across a variety of destinies but come together in one person… it is not graveside prose but rather literature in the tradition of the 1920’s… not Bondarev or Bykov, but Gazdanov, Babel"
L. YUZEFOVICH