Description
Book SynopsisKsenia Bushka’s
The Freedom Factory tells the story of a real-life military factory through monologues collected from anonymized workers, managers, and engineers. Not exactly realism, the novel combines poetry and documentary in unique proportion to transport its reader to the harsh and magnetic factory floor. If the Moth Radio Hour had a special episode to introduce listeners to the mythos, pathos, and yes, bathos of twentieth–century Russia, this would be it.
Winner of Russia’s National Bestseller Prize (2014) and essential reading to understand the persistence of the Soviet mindset,
The Freedom Factory is a book of paradox, at once recognizable and idealized: a bittersweet recounting of military secrets and anecdotes, work and leisure, life stories and love stories.
Trade Review"Rife with laugh-out-loud moments, heartbreak, and arresting lyricism, Buksha’s The Freedom Factory brings a bygone era to life in all of its madness, harshness, and beauty. And lucky for us, Anne O. Fisher has rendered it in an English text that is just as dazzling as the original." —Sarah Kapp, The Moscow Times
“The Freedom Factory is a thriller, a romance, and a social drama all in one, and—this is especially important—it’s a book by a post–Soviet person about the Soviet experience.” —Dmitriy Bykov
“My first impression was that of a … novel written by a slightly drunk Joyce. ” —Maxim Amelin
“[When I read the novel] I thought of Spanish Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela and his novel The Hive… which through the blending of many disparate voices gives an image of the time, the characters, the particular atmosphere. The Freedom Factory has echoes of this same device.” —Gennadiy Kalashnikov
“Ksenia Buksha has successfully done what no one else, it seems has been able to do: combine utopia and anti–utopia.” —Nadezhda Sergeyeva
A previous translation by Anne O. Fisher won the Cliff Becker Prize for Poetry in Translation
