My father’s leg and other relics. Zinik Z.

“The Soviet government collapsed, the soil went from under his feet, and my father felt like an emigrant in his own country,” the Russian-British writer Zinovy ​​Zinik expressed the sensations of many of his former fellow citizens in one of the essays of the nineties. In the new collection of prose of different years, “my father’s leg and other relics” surrealism of plots is adjacent to memoir-documentary chronicle and journalism-from describing the Father's funeral to murder in a radio, from a polemic with the father of Kafka to a textbook essay on social art, never published in Russia. Different in the genre, the works of the collection, balancing on the verge of reality and fiction, are united by one leitmotif - the figure of the father, which, transforming, forces the characters of this book (and at the same time the reader) to experience paradoxical meetings with the Soviet past. This past re -arises under various guises in the unexpected geography of the story - in Moscow and Prague, Yekaterinburg and Koenigsberg, Shadrinsk and London - and violates the passport boundaries of our consciousness. This is a book about the Soviet heritage in each of us.