ISBN 5-7172-0056-0
Penne Prize (Italy) 1998; Anti-Booker Prize 1998; Znamya Prize 1998; State Prize for Literature 2001
"Volos narrows the perspective of his narrative to the emotional experience of a few eye-witnesses and so creates an extraordinarily vivid and multifaceted atmosphere. This is the city of Hurramabad shimmering in the heat, the hurly-burly of the bazaars, in little side streets and in the habitations of Tajik shepherds. The growing suspense of Hurramabad will be felt even by readers who have not a slightest interest in this Central Asian country." — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Hurramabad, a Novel in Facets describes the bloody national strife and the eviction of Russians from Tajikistan following the collapse of the USSR. Hurramabad, for which the Tajik capital Dushanbe served as a prototype, is a mythical city of joy and happiness where there is always an abundance of fresh water and shade. The novel starts with an old Russian woman reminiscing about the past, as she climbs the hill to the cemetery where her husband is buried. He was a Red Commissar who came to Tajikistan in the twenties as a representative of the new rule, which ended in the nineties.
A Russian engineer falls in love with Tajik culture. He gives up his comfortable life in Moscow to settle in Dushanbe where he takes a menial job at the bazaar, marries a Tajik woman, learns the language and adopts the local customs. Outwardly he becomes more and more like a Tajik, but when he wants to join the volunteer troops he is still rejected as a foreigner. His final acceptance comes only at a terrible price.
Five Russian journalists have been taken hostage by a particularly ferocious Tajik warlord who wants to trade them for a right of passage through territory held by government troops. Several years of brutal civil war have turned these fighters into unfeeling war machines. The journalists discuss the situation in terms which show that they have little understanding of the situation, or of their predicament.
Volos creates vivid pictures from street scenes and snatches of conversation at the bazaar, comments by wise old men and life stories of simple people, Russian and Tajik alike. He creatively continues the tradition of austere realism in Russian literature. His prose has been praised for its economical but expressive language, especially in the dialogues, for its sharp psychological insights and evocative descriptions of nature and national traditions.
Andrei Volos was born in Tajikistan and left the country to enroll in the Oil and Gas Institute in Moscow. As a geophysicist he has traveled the width and breadth of Central Asia. His family was forced to leave Tajikistan in the 1990s when life there became unbearable for "foreigners".
"The best book to come out of Russia in the last decade," — Neue Zuricher Zeitung
"The focused chaos in Hurramabad reveals a quantity of open wounds which will never heal." — Berliner Zeitung
"Where is Tajikistan? Is it far away? Not at all. Volos writes so visually of this former Soviet republic as if it were around the corner." — Tages Anzeiger
