Russian Service (Russkaya Sluzhba)

The dream of seeing the faces of legendary foreign radio commentators, whose voices, filtering through jammers, the hero of 'Russian Service' heard in Moscow, leads this lowly Soviet official to the corridors of the Foreign Broadcasting Department in London. But faces don't always match voices, and his unique gift for correcting spelling errors in ministerial reports is of no use to anyone working on the air. Published forty years ago in Paris and serialized on English and French radio, Zinovy ​​Zinik's novel has long since become a classic of the Cold War era, with its Gothic trappings—the Iron Curtain, émigré squabbles, and poisoned umbrellas. But, as the author points out, Russian history does not stand still: it repeats itself, again and again. Zinovy ​​Zinik is a novelist and essayist. He emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1975. He has lived in the UK since 1976. The author of the books 'The Orgone Box' (2017), 'A Yarmulke under a Turban' (2018), 'My Father's Leg and Other Relics' (2020), as well as the collections 'Emigration as a Literary Device' (2011), 'The Third Jerusalem' (2013), and 'No Cause for Alarm' (2022), published by NLO.