Sergeĭ Lebedev (1981–)

Vyrin, a Russian defector, is discovered and fatally poisoned by secret service agents. Kalitin, a 70-year old chemist who also had escaped to the West after the collapse of the USSR and now lives a secluded life in the former GDR, is invited to join the investigative team. The choice is unsurprising: Kalitin was one of the Soviet Union’s top experimental scientists and the developer of Neophyte, an “untraceable” terribly lethal poison. But someone leaks information about Kalitin’s involvement in the Vyrin inquiry, and the Russian authorities, newly apprised of his whereabouts decide to silence him. Ruthless military officer Shershnev is dispatched with a colleague on a mission to kill Kalitin using the very same poison developed by the chemist in his USSR days.

Sergei Lebedev’s Untraceable has the trappings of a spy thriller and is not short of incident – there is a harrowing and exciting description of a hunt for lab monkeys after an experiment gone wrong, as well as a quasi-farcical account of the assassins’ trip to the sleepy village where Kalitin hides. However, the novel’s focus is on the psychological and moral make-up of the protagonists, both of them cynical, single-minded tools of the regime. On the one hand there is Kalitin, who defected out of disappointment at the fall of the USSR rather than out of any sense of guilt or moral duty, and who, now diagnosed with cancer, dreams of a return to his past in the lab. On the other hand there is Shershnev, a human killing machine, who has trained himself to subsume any feelings which can get in the way of a mission.

Untraceable largely shifts between the points of view of these two characters. Towards the end, however, Lebedev introduces another player in the dramatis personae: Travniček, a pastor who has had past brushes with the Soviet secret service, and who provides a ray of hope and redemption in an otherwise bleak worldview. By his own account, Travniček is neither hero nor saint, but in this moral swampland, his valiant attempts to do right by his parishioners – including Kalitin – makes of him a character worthy of a Graham Greene novel.

Lebedev’s novel, partly inspired by the Skripal case, is topical and engaging. The cover of the edition I read, portraying a shadowy figure shrouded in mist, seems to reflect the ethical ambiguity of the world in which the novel’s characters work and live. The exquisite English translation by Antonina W. Bouis is not only readable and idiomatic, whilst retaining a lyrical and poetic feel.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2021/03/untraceable-by-sergei-lebedev.html… (meer)

I found this novel to be slow and rather dull, but also important, so I stuck it out. And it took me 16 days to listen to this--an under-10-hour book.

There is no plot per se, instead a young man travels to the Russian taiga to learn more about the elderly man "Grandfather II" who save his life twice--before he was born, and then with a blood transfusion later that ultimately killed the elderly man himself. Who was he? Where did he come from, what was his history?

So this young man travels east and north, to the region of Soviet prison camps and mines, where a few reindeer herders who escaped the Soviets settling them still live, where escaped prisoners still escape to, and area and people that Russia ignores. And he learns about Grandfather IIs past. It is not what he expected.

I found this very interesting if dull and plotless. I would really prefer this story in nonfiction form, but I don't know if that has been written (or these days, if it can be written at all)--or translated into English if it does exist.

I liked the narration, Daniel Gamburg has enough of a Russian accent to pronounce Russian words and names properly and to lend a feeling of authenticity (and I could not forget where the story was)--but not so strong as to be hard to understand in any way.… (meer)