Winner of the Russian Booker Prize, Stamp Album is a pastiche of memories "illustrated" with family documents, newspaper clippings, slogans, letters, children's rhymes and irreverences. Sergeyev slips back and forth in time -- before, during and after the war -- as well as in place -- between the communal apartment where he lives in Moscow (the best room is occupied by the eccentric widow of a French merchant, an erstwhile prostitute now bedridden with gout: before the Revolution the entire apartment belonged to her) and the dacha where he spends his summers and where this mosaic begins. With photographic clarity and overarching logic, Sergeyev recreates the very texture and perversity of Soviet life.
Andrei Sergeyev (1933-1998), a poet and professional numismatist, was better known as a translator of English and American poetry, including that of Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden. In the 1950s Sergeyev belonged to the original underground literary group that invented samizdat (hand-production and dissemination of banned books). Written in the 1970s "for the drawer", Stamp Album was published in Russia in 1996. This is Sergeyev's first appearance in English translation.
Joanne Turnbull has translated a number of books from Russian, including Andrei Sinyavsky's Soviet Civilization (Arcade, 1991), Asar Eppel's The Grassy Street (Glas, 1998) and Lev Rubinstein's Here I Am (Glas, 2002). She lives in Moscow.
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