Glas 29, 208 pages
ISBN 5-7172-0060-9

From Jose Alanis’s essay on Ronshin:
Towards the end of Valery Ronshin's "Living a Life," the glum hero Trostnikov makes a startling discovery: a freak accident has killed all the other characters in the story.

Similarly, at the end of "Taman" an itinerant writer named Ronshin bemusedly stumbles on a critical secret shared by the people with whom he's just been dining: they're — uh, oh — all dead.

Ronshin's characters do not bleed or break bones; they often don't "really" die at all. His figures operate in a recognizably Soviet late-stagnation-era period, yet his minimalist settings remain curiously timeless. As in Kharms' works, hours, days, years, are measured in the psychological movements of characters' subjectivity: swoons, boredom, endlessly repeated drudgery, blinks, reverie or moment-by-moment awareness. Death as absence, as annihilation, never quite fully enters such a picture. Exhumed coffins often turn up empty, or contain the wrong body (which is not really dead anyway); reincarnation figures as commonplace; death, in its time-honored guise of a beautiful woman, smiles for a photograph. "Eternal Return," in which the two main characters really do "die" at the end, the story's title — to say nothing of its humorously drawn theme of reincarnation — makes nonsense of the notion that they have disappeared, never to come back.

Having broken through the threshold into Ronshin's afterlife, these characters often find themselves trapped, their freedom curtailed, beset by forces they cannot control — making Ronshin's work as indebted to Kafka as to Kharms. The mood, more often than not one of parody, bemused jest and light black humor, nonetheless carries a tension, an air of imminent threat. Another contributor to the sense of a timeless, inescapable recurrence in these works is the author's repeated use of the same stock figures and names, which regularly appear in the stories playing different "roles": Makarov, usually a vain writer on the make; Ronshin, the author's introjection into his narratives; Schulz, a mysterious Woland-like figure who usually plays the part of mad scientist; an evil dwarf; cats; the standard vulgarian alcoholic; the virginal yet seductive Poe-like heroine, who oddly enough often appears as a whore. Clearly, these characters and types are taken as much from Dostoyevsky, science fiction and other sources as from Ronshin's own imaginings, and much of the humor in the stories derives from unpacking these intertextual games.

"Real humor is always black," says Valery Ronshin, a highly imaginative and prolific writer whose work includes a strong element of mysticism. His fresh and distinctive literary style recalls that of the 20th century Russian writers of the absurd such as Daniil Kharms. Ronshin's reality is necessarily absurd, sometimes silly. And always haunted by the grotesque, which may intrude at any moment.

Born in 1962, Ronshin graduated with a degree in history from Petrozavodsk University in Karelia. He now lives in St Petersburg. Ronshin is also a successful children's author with more than 20 books to his name. He wrote the first detective novel for Russian children.

"Ronshin’s stories are reminiscent of early Pelevin... They’re sparkling with humor and offer much food for thought. He has not yet reached the summit of his success but we have no doubt that one day he will win international fame." — Literaturnaya Gazeta

"Hilariously funny black humor... A brilliant writer of absurd tales..." — Sobesednik