The Rat-Killer
Originally printed in 2001 by EKSMO, Aleksandr Terekhov's play was translated into English by Natalie Roy and B.T. Gall and published by Alma Books in 2008.
The Novel
I like The Rat-Killer... I always do like these sardonic Russian tales - a genre on their own - that take satire to its extreme - Doris Lessing
Funny, crazy and wonderfully unpredictable - The Times
A fine satire in a Gogol-esque vein about the mendacity and greed of small-town officials – The Guardian
'The Rat-Killer' reveals both the absurdity and horror of post-communist Russia through a depiction of a small, rat infested industrial satellite town.
Rats and human beings aren't that far apart from each other in "The Rat-Killer". As the political intrigue of phantasmagorical post-communist reality develops into nightmare, the greed, cunning and malice of the humans more and more resemble the behaviour of the large communities of destructive rodents, while the rats acquire more and more human features. Svetloyar is bidding to be included in the list of historical towns making up Russia's famous "golden Ring" around Moscow, a lucrative tourist route. However, aside from the problem that it has no history (having been entirely constructed during the Stalinist period), the place is over- run by rats, so two pest-controllers are summoned from Moscow.What follows is an astute interrogation of the nature of both humanity and history, as Terekhov subtly sets alongside the narrator's desire for the re- ional dictator's wife with his perpetual concern for the destruction of rats. Whilst clearly a novel of the classical Russian tradition, "The Rat-Killer" also incorporates the more experimental and satirical aesthetic of Soviet writers such as Bulgakov, and as the narrator's perception of reality be-comes increasingly warped, so does our experience of the almost comically grotesque landscape around him.