Stamp Album (Vol.28 of the GLAS Series) - A Collection of People, Things, Relationships and Words

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.

"Stamp Album paints a picture of a huge and not yet explored 'catacomb Russia'. The communal apartment he describes is not at all a typical community of Soviet citizens. They do not fight the regime, nor do they adapt to it. Sergeyev's memory seems to collect mere trifles: children's ditties, counting rhymes, old slogans, newspaper clippings, snatches of conversations, official documents, urban folklore and much else. He fishes various fragments out of this detritus and files them carefully away in his stamp album." --Russkaya Mysl

"Extraordinary memory, the firm grasp of a professional collector, fantastic 'short-sighted' sharpness of vision, a passion for details and objects as well as individuals - all these make Stamp Album fascinating reading." --Russian Journal

"A true master of time, Sergeyev will always be absolutely contemporary. He stands alone." --Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye "I value Sergeev's opinion exceedingly, I would even say that Sergeev's opinion of my poems has always been more important to me than anything on earth: If there existed some higher or last judgment for me in matters of poetry, then it was Sergeev's opinion." --Joseph Brodsky