A New Novel of the Soviet Thaw: “The Kuleshov Effect” — “Эффект Кулешова”

On November 1, 1974, the mercurial Soviet screenwriter Gennady Shpalikov is found hanging by his scarf in a Moscow apartment. Two decades later, American orphan Tom Benjamin sees the long-banned original cut of Shpalikov’s greatest film, The Ilich Gate,and declares “I know these people.”

At age 20, tormented by impossible recollections of Shpalikov’s death, Tom goes to Russia for answers. Lost on a milky night in 1995 Petersburg, he meets film student Kira Morozova. She, too, is haunted by inexplicable memories: a tsarist massacre, a husband lost to Stalin’s Gulag … and her own death. 

But right now, she has work to do. On the set of The Ilich Gate. In 1961. 

And she takes Tom with her. In the movies, anything is possible . . .

The Russian translation of my new novel, THE KULESHOV EFFECT — “Эффект Кулешова” — has been published by the dissident exile press Freedom Letters, publishers of works by Alexei Navalny, Ilya Yashin—who was released in the recent prisoner exchange—and the renowned Russian exile novelist and poet Dmitry Bykov.

“This is probably the best American novel about Russia in the past 50 years, if not longer,” Bykov writes in his forward to “Эффект Кулешова”. “And precisely this book reminds us of the country where we all once lived, and which was worth loving.”

Bykov has called the novel, which spans the 20th century but is centered on the cultural Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, “a brilliant farewell anthem for a dying Russian civilization.” The beautiful translation by Ekaterina Kevkhishvili perfectly captures the rhythms and moods of the original English. We decided to publish the novel first in Russian, at a time when an entire post-Soviet shadow culture—some of its members in diaspora, some in a sort of internal exile, many in stages of patient and unyielding resistance—has been created by authoritarianism and war. We are currently seeking the right publisher for the English version.

For readers of Russian, or even for English-speaking friends who would simply like to have a copy of the first published version of “The Kuleshov Effect”, here is the link at Freedom Letters. I should add that this publishing company is doing extraordinarily brave work. While my book is, at its foundation, a love story about a boy, a girl, and a remarkable moment in history, many of the works published by Freedom Letters are engaged in an epochal battle for freedom of speech, thought, and conscience, and to support Freedom Letters is to support this mission.

https://freedomletters.org/books/effekt-kuleshova

Many thanks!

– Greg