Lizka and Her Men

Lizka is a young Russian living an unexciting life in a backward rural town. After her first fleeting and unsatisfactory sexual experience sets the locals’ tongues wagging, she moves to a larger town – G – in search of a new life – and love. As she moves from one relationship to another, her ‘men’ include a local con-man, a powerful Party official (later the local governor), a trolleybus driver, a belligerent young army veteran and, ultimately, a poet, the narrator of the story, who finally takes her away from G.

In keeping with our heroine’s own character, and in the tradition of the great Russian writers, Ikonnikov draws out the tragic-comic nature of his characters and their obsessions, and presents the reader with a wonderfully detailed picture of provincial Russian characters, habits, opinions and desires.