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Evgenii Belodubrovskii's Thirteen Coats is a meditation on
Leningrad-St. Petersburg from his birth in 1941 on the eve of the
German invasion, his survival of the three-year blockade, and his
post-war Leningrad literary life. Russia's twentieth century
traumas--two world wars and its long civil war--endured until
Stalin's death (1953). If there is a big picture, perhaps it is
contained within the pages of The Black Book of Communism whereby
French humanists struggled to enumerate the tens of millions
murdered in the name of the twentieth century religion of
Communism. Yet, numbers empty tragedy of meaning. Stalin, the great
cynic, said that one death was a tragedy; ten thousand a statistic.
Evgenii Belodubrovskii is among those Russian patriots who
struggles to tell the history of Russia's vast twentieth-century
tragedy, one story at a time.
Spirit Falls is a coming-of-age novel set in the late 1950's on the
empty and hardscrabble borderland between Michigan's Upper
Peninsula and northern Wisconsin. Ricky Belisle is a boy born to
first-generation Americans who have migrated north to farm and hold
land that cannot be taken away from them. They bring with them the
beliefs, manners and stories of the homeland that they have not
occupied and in so doing they create a disconnect in Ricky that
forces him to begin the exploration that will eventually take him
away from the land that has leached into his bones, that has given
him the foundation for how he sees the world. Marie Jeanne
Charbonneau, "M.J.," a French-Canadian tomboy, is his best, his
only, friend, who shows Ricky that the world is wider than he
thinks and that much of life takes place in the space between the
words. Their relationship sparks the hunt for truth within
themselves. The gypsy-like refugee Marina Svetana, green-eyed,
black-haired, beautiful and wounded, a fragment of war-torn Europe,
arrives like a visitation of the spirit world. Her arrival is the
beginning of Ricky's journey. Ricky Belisle, Marie Jeanne
Charbonneau and Marina Svetana find themselves on the eve of the
winter solstice, the coldest, longest night of the year, set on a
course that will last until the spring thaw brings with it a
cascade of events that ends with Ricky carrying M.J. in his arms
across the Great Bogus Swamp into the teeth of a 100 year Lake
Superior storm. He wants only for her to survive this catastrophe
and for him to find what it means to be a man. Ricky identifies
with the land, the source of his strengths and weaknesses,
requiring of him those things that he would not require of himself.
He must learn to live with his fear of its darkness, to manage a
homeland both harsh and sublime, and learn to leave behind the
place both familiar and brutal. Ricky's struggle is to sort out
what role women play in his life, how an honorable man treats those
who are weaker, and how a young mans knows truth--by what he is
told or by what he feels.
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