new award
Yasnaya Polyana Award 2024
In Leonid Yuzefovich’s latest and again award winning book, he brings history back to life by again empathizing with the mind of a historically authentic figure. These are the fictional but based on real events memoirs of the Russian officer, Captain Solodovnikov, who served as a military adviser in the Mongolian army in 1912–1914, when the Mongols defended their independence from China. The book intertwines the siege of the Chinese-occupied fortress of Bar-Khoto with love for the wife of a Russian diplomat in Mongolia, the First World War and Solodovnikov’s deportation from Leningrad to Transbaikalia in the mid-1930s. The hero rethinks his own life and, with it, the fate of a person in a critical epoch.