The recurring themes of
Moscow But Dreaming (Prime Books, pb, 286pp) by Ekaterina Sedia are not happy ones. These are stories of drudgery, degradation and misery, of people with nothing to live for, and women worn away to nothing, like the ghosts of murdered young women in “Tin Cans”, or the unnamed protagonist of “Zombie Lenin”, numbed by misery, followed by a zombie Lenin since she was a little girl, and institutionalised for talking about it, or the protagonist of “Citizen Komarova Finds Love”, an aristocrat before the Russian Revolution, who now works in a consignment shop in the town of N. and gets involved with a cavalryman. “With him, he brought the cutting wind and the sense of great desolation”, not to mention a horse’s leg in a burlap sack, but compared to most men we meet in this book he’s George Clooney carrying a Marks & Spencer’s ready meal for two.
