The Year in Books

It says something about Russia's abiding mystique that Western dailies keep likening the recent death of the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, and the widening trail of the radioactive material that killed him, to something out of a Cold War spy novel. John le Carre, Ian Fleming -- take your pick. Years after the Cold War's end, these authors' classic fictions of border-hopping, identity-swapping murder and intrigue seem just as real as ever.

As it turns out, the extremes of Russian life have always stoked the imagination. A survey of the Russia-related books reviewed this year in The Moscow Times unearths a bumper crop of fiction that explores reality's edges. Memorable characters include a tough-talking serial murderess from an imaginary war-torn Caucasus republic; a timid Russian emigre who upends literary convention by deciding to become a writer's muse; and a cop with supernatural powers who polices the vampires slinking around Moscow. But if these characters take life to the extremes, then the astonishing real-life people and circumstances profiled in this year's nonfiction works give them a run for their money. Here are the six books -- fiction and nonfiction -- that best probed the fringes of Russian reality.

Novel: Outsized characters are Gary Shteyngart's specialty, but the comic hero of "Absurdistan" (Random House) gives new meaning to "larger than life." Misha Vainberg, the obese son of Russia's 1,238th-richest man, has everything a man could ever want except for a visa to America. Aching for his beloved New York, Misha travels to a wildly corrupt former Soviet republic to obtain an illegal Belgian passport that will help get him there. Our reviewer, Aaron Hamburger, calls this satire of post-communist capitalism "rollicking, expansive" and "richly anarchic," and sets Shteyngart in a class "apart from most of his contemporaries."

Debut: Olga Grushin's virtuosic first novel, "The Dream Life of Sukhanov" (Putnam), recalls a not-too-distant past when art was more about politics than creativity. On the eve of perestroika, the establishment critic Anatoly Sukhanov recalls his youth as a promising experimental painter, his decision to forfeit talent for security, and the moral bankruptcy that ensued. Grushin, who was 18 when she moved to the United States, is hailed by our reviewer, Katherine Shonk, as a "major new talent." Her book "would be a remarkable achievement if it had been translated from Russian to English; the fact that Grushin is writing with such sustained finesse and confidence in a second language is astonishing."

Collection: If early Soviet satire is known for its caricatures of the man-on-the-street, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's "Seven Stories" (Glas) captures what that man got up to when no one else was looking. These newly translated stories feature a performance artist's efforts to bite his own elbow and a famous pianist's cross-city pursuit of his runaway hand. Krzhizhanovky, who died in Moscow in 1950, barely saw his fiction published -- an undeserved fate for this wonderful author who, as our reviewer, Benjamin Paloff, puts it, reveled in violating "all the critical taboos" and turned that violation into a "means of seduction."

History: The ever-present specter of what-might-have-been makes Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali's "Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary" (Norton) a fascinating and often chilling read. Fursenko and Naftali look back to Nikita Khrushchev's recklessness during the Hungarian and Suez crises of 1956 for hints of what would follow several years later, when the Soviet leader oversaw the building of the Berlin Wall and the shipment of nuclear missiles to Cuba. Our reviewer, James Goldgeier, commends the authors for their "extraordinary" research and for their "tantalizing" glimpses of moments at which the standoff might have taken a turn for the better -- or for the worse.

Biography: Currently impersonated by Ethan Hawke in the New York premiere of Tom Stoppard's theatrical trilogy "The Coast of Utopia," the revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin became a star in his own right during the European upheavals of the 19th century. In "Bakunin" (Thomas Dunne), Mark Leier grapples with the charismatic anarchist's ideas, from his criticism of religion and authority to his views on violence as a means of change. According to our reviewer, Walter G. Moss, Leier sees no shortage of modern echoes in Bakunin's writings on the dangers of capitalism and the state.

Politics: When Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in October, observers predicted that her murder, like those of other targeted journalists, would go unsolved. And so far, in circumstances that might have found a place in her book "Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy" (Metropolitan), the predictions have been borne out. Our reviewer, Peter Baker, calls this raw, crusading work of reportage a "must-read" for anyone who wants to understand contemporary Russia and praises Politkovskaya as "a witness, a chronicler of tales that give voice to the everyday people who find themselves part of a society weighed down by corruption and callousness."

Rebecca Reich is the books editor of The Moscow Times.