Horsemen of the Sands

by

Translated from by

Published: October 30th, 2018

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ISBN: N/A

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Book Description

In a Soviet elementary school, a bombastic teacher lectures his young students on traffic accidents and family separation, unwittingly stirring an emotional crisis. A lost wallet, an office fling, an upset stomach—the minutiae of life unveil the private tragedies at the heart of a school community.

A world away, an old herdsman entrances a young tank commander with the legend of Baron Ungern, the real-life White Russian officer who conquered Mongolia. A foggy epic unfolds, a tale of faith and revenge centering on a mysterious amulet, said to make the wearer invincible. From the dim of the classroom to the vast Mongolian steppe, Leonid Yuzefovich’s masterful novellas The Storm and Horsemen of the Sands drill straight to the core of human emotion. These Russian parables illuminate the fears, passions, and ambitions beneath the grandest acts and the tiniest gestures.

Shot through with a mythic and cipherlike style, Yuzefovich’s novellas are cogent depictions of faith, obsession, power, and the ties that bind.

Publishers Weekly


Without discarding realism, this finely counterpointed tale suggests that magic works only if one believes in it. The same can be said of fiction, and Leonid Yuzefovich’s writing certainly has what it takes to earn our trust.

Anna Aslanyan, The Times Literary Supplement


Beware the “smell of electricity” wafting through the story and remarked upon obliquely by its character: this novella is charged throughout and leaves a scorching impression.
Sabrina Jaszi, Reading in Translation


Because Leonid Yuzefovich seems to have drunk at the same spring that nourished two centuries of great Russian writers, you may feel that you have read him before. But you probably haven’t. He has been well-served by his translator Marian Schwartz, who delivers these very Russian stories in pitch-perfect English.

Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books


These are fitting novellas to bring to an American public...they eschew the Russian penchant for long philosophical monologues or dialogues that create philosophical debate and meaning in a work, and instead Yuzefovich opts for the more “American” style of communicating meaning through events themselves...The internal consistency of the novellas is a testament to the craft of the writer, and also to Schwartz’s translation.

Ryan K. Strader, Cleaver Magazine


History and human drama collide in Leonid Yuzefovich’s Horsemen of the Sands, a wonderful tangle of relationships, religions, and realism...The prose adroitly bears both an ethereal and a concrete quality...culminating in a fascinating meditation on trickery and the power of suggestion.

Meagan Logsdon, Foreword Reviews


Yuzefovich is an author who well knows the value of words and is firmly convinced that god is in simplicity. Despite the teeming mangyses and hubilgans here, this is high Russian prose written in superb language, very precise and lucid. “The Storm”… is stunning for its mettle, wit, and psychological acuity. Yuzefovich’s art is slicing open man’s unremarkable covering and revealing his tightly sealed safe with one light blow…

Lev Danilkin, Afisha


Yuzefovich often takes us to Mongolia. When he writes about that country, he achieves the impossible: he knows and loves it so well and describes it so realistically that he ends up creating his own special Mongolia, a “Mongolia of the spirit.”

Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA Novosti


Yuzefovich’s chief merit as a writer may be the author’s astoundingly warm, tender, and at the same time humor-filled attitude toward his heroes.

Marina Abasheva, Fililog


The two novellas collected in Leonid Yuzefovich’s Horsemen of the Sands take all of Russian literature and turn it on its head. Yuzefovich can be as subtle as Chekhov or as brutal as Gogol but underneath it all is a radical vision of the political and emotional history of his country that challenges everything we think we know about that vast land.

Joshua Furst


The Storm and Horsemen of the Sands are not fast-paced reads, but they move purposefully. The former asks readers to go beneath the surface, while the latter opens up an unfamiliar world and invites us to think about the stories we tell. One can only hope that more of Yuzefovich’s work makes its way into English with all the speed and determination of the horsemen he chronicles.

Yelena Furman, Los Angeles Review of Books


Yuzefovich, in Marian Schwartz’s crisp and vibrant translation, is a master of the telling detail. Whether animating the vivid strangeness of childhood or illuminating the life of a Russian general in Mongolia, these stories are full of carefully calibrated observations, often tracing exuberant aspirations and tragic follies in equal measure

Michael Holtmann, Center for the Art of Translation


The framed narrative structure is gripping and seeps with layers of history. In English, Marian Schwartz expertly translates the different storytelling rhythms of each teller.

Olga Zilberbourg, World Literature Today


Dark psychological undercurrents swirl, and tragedies lie hidden beneath the surface . . . deceptively simple.

Stephen Pimenoff, Stand Magazine