“A brilliant farewell anthem for a dying Russian civilization”: Reviews and reader responses to the novel The Kuleshov Effect (Эффект Кулешова)
About THE KULESHOV EFFECT (Эффект Кулешова) (Freedom Letters, 2024)
On November 1, 1974, the mercurial Soviet screenwriter and poet 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 and declares: “I know these people.”
Tormented by impossible recollections of Shpalikov’s final years, Tom goes to Russia for answers. Lost on a milky night in 1995 Petersburg, he meets film student Kira Morozova — a young woman untangling her own inexplicable memories: a tsarist massacre, a husband lost to Stalin’s Gulag, and her own death. But right now, Kira has work to do. On the set of Shpalikov’s film. In 1961.
And she takes Tom with her.
Suddenly spliced into the vibrant, dangerous days of the post-Stalin Thaw, Tom and Kira build a life together in Soviet cinema. But in Russia, as in the movies, new dangers always loom — and with them, cruel choices.
Using the eponymous film theory—the Kuleshov Effect—as both a structuring element and a metaphor for how the characters’ lives are “edited” and recontextualized by systems of power, THE KULESHOV EFFECT sheds light not only Russia’s past, but also on its current brutal impasse.
About the Russian-language publication
THE KULESHOV EFFECT (Эффект Кулешова) was translated from English by Ekaterina Kevkhishvili with a foreword by the renowned Russian dissident writer Dmitry Bykov and published in late 2024 by the dissident exile press Freedom Letters. Freedom Letters was created after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine by publisher Georgy Urushadze, the former director of Russia’s Big Book Award—the Russian equivalent of our National Book Award. The press, dedicated to publishing works that would fall afoul of Putin’s censors, has released books by luminaries such as novelist Vladimir Sorokin, the late Alexei Navalny, dissident leader Ilya Yashin, revered Ukrainian poet Alexander Kabanov, and Dmitry Bykov himself. In early 2025, Effekt Kuleshova was named one of the publisher’s best books of 2024.
Since its publication, Effekt Kuleshova has received excellent reviews and attention from the burgeoning Russian/Ukrainian literary diaspora. The book was reviewed in Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s most prominent opposition newspaper, now operating in exile. (I have translated the review, written by the legendary Soviet animator Andrei Khrzhanovsky, here.) I also had the opportunity to appear on literary critic Nikolai Alexandrov’s popular YouTube show, Not Only About Books for a wonderful (and exhausting!) hourlong Russian interview. (I shared my thoughts on the interview—which we had to repeat twice due to a power outage in, of all places, Tbilisi—here.) The book was also prominently featured on exile journalist Dmitry Gubin’s show, ON AIR.
Effekt Kuleshova has been sold online and in bookstores across Europe and in Israel, where the émigré and exile communities are, in the Russian fashion, voracious readers. Eventually, Georgy Urushadze managed to get Effekt Kuleshova and a handful of other Freedom Letters books placed (for as long as he can manage to keep them there) on the primary Russian online bookstore, Ozon, so in recent weeks the book has been able to reach readers in Russia proper.
Responses to the Russian version of THE KULESHOV EFFECT:
“Greg Blake Miller’s The Kuleshov Effect is probably the best American novel about Russia in the past 50 years, if not longer … a brilliant farewell anthem for a dying Russian civilization.”
– Dmitry Bykov, Russian exile novelist and poet, two-time winner of the Big Book Award (Russia’s equivalent of the National Book Award).
“The Kuleshov Effect is a beautiful book, wise and deep, filled with intriguing references and “Easter eggs”. It crosses many eras, but at the center of the upheavals is the Soviet Thaw of the 1960s. And the living eyewitnesses to the age say it’s as if the author was beside them and heard and saw them and described everything the way it really was. There’s just the right amount of mysticism in The Kuleshov Effect. There’s a shocking final twist. And there’s a cat who travels between worlds.”
– Marina Dyachenko, winner of the Aelita Prize and co-author of the Vita Nostra series, including the recently released School of Shards (Harper Voyager, 2025)
“The Kuleshov Effect has millions of readers all over the world; many of them just don’t know it yet. Please open this book and enter this world: It’s real down to the smallest detail, fantastic, cruel, tender. Get to know these people — or have you already known them a long time? In cinema, the Kuleshov Effect is an editing technique in which the collision of frames produces new meanings and sensations. In Greg Blake Miller’s masterly (and “Margarita-ly”) novel, the mosaic of images and upheavals of 20th-century Russia works in exactly this way. Is it mysticism? Phantasmagoria? But in that case, why do the eyewitnesses to these events confirm that it all happened just like this?”
– Marina Dyachenko
“I read The Kuleshov Effect with excitement, gulping in the air of bygone years. People I’d known well suddenly reappeared, mystically alive, as if they’d gone out a moment and then come back, not understanding my shock. The gestures, the expressions—this is who they were! Miller conveyed what’s impossible to convey—the spirit of an age—with composition that’s refined but natural and absolutely organic. One wants to live different lives—isn’t that what we all hope for? The Kuleshov Effect is a one-of-a-kind thing, significant in many ways.”
– Alexander Mindadze, screenwriter (The Fox Hunt, Parade of Planets, Dreaming of Space, Minnesota) and director (The Separation, On Saturday)
“Having been privileged to read both the manuscript of The Kuleshov Effect in the original English, as well as the Russian translation version published by the leading dissident publisher Freedom Letters, I can attest that this novel, is fascinating, absolutely masterful prose, mesmerizing in both versions. Miller is a guide at the level of Lem and Tarkovsky through various eras, especially the magical 1960s. His seemingly nonchalant, yet caring and precisely multidimensional chronicle creates a unique, virtually cinematic atmosphere. Once an anglophone reader is given an opportunity to begin this literary journey, the epiphany will be a memorable one indeed.”
– Gari Lait, author of Confluences (Bagriy, 2020), Saganazh (Kreschatik/MGraphics 2024), and Doloroso (Textum Araneum, Kyiv, 2022)
“Nothing since Jonathan Littel’s The Kindly Ones has fascinated and astonished me like Greg Blake Miller’s The Kuleshov Effect. The book has the effect of cinematic montage, splicing together voices from different historical epochs to create a fantastical narrative. Each time period grows organically into the next, first with fragmentary memories about the heroes of the great Sixties generation, and then with the appearance of the heroes themselves. Thanks to Ekaterina Kevkhishvili’s outstanding translation, the style of the prose inherits and revives the almost carefree intonations of that great generation, the intonation of love for life and the acceptance of it as it turns tragic.”
— Elena Stishova, former editor of The Art of Cinema (Iskusstvo Kino, the largest and most important Russian/Soviet film journal), longtime professor at the State Cinema Institute (VGIK), and winner of a Nika (the Russian Oscars) Lifetime Achievement Award for Contributions to the Cinema.
“Remember this name: Greg Blake Miller. The novel is The Kuleshov Effect, and it’s the best book about Russia in the 21st century, and, really, in the last half of the previous century. … The two others that come to mind are Paul Russell’s The Unreal Life of Sergei Nabokov and J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, which are both outstanding. … Miller’s novel shifts between Leningrad/Saint Petersburg and Moscow in the 1920s, 1960s, and 1990s, written with stunning knowledge of the smallest details of those times. … You’ve never seen me so blown away by a novel, and I’m afraid you won’t again in the next 50 years.”
– Dmitry Gubin, prominent exile Russian journalist, and host of Gubin ONAIR.
“Having stopped producing illusions, Russia produces emigrants — this is the first thing you think while reading Greg Blake Miller’s outstanding new novel, The Kuleshov Effect. This is likely the best novel about Russia in the past half century. You have the sense that you’re watching Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, Alexei German’s Khrustalyov, Мy Car!, and Kira Muratova’s Brief Encounters all at the same time, simultaneously not understanding a damn thing and suffocating with happiness. And it’s an ingenious translation. Pull your umbrella back, as Pasternak said, and go get your copy right away!”
– Dmitry Gubin
“I once wrote that my late friend and colleague Gennady Shpalikov—one of the real-life heroes of Greg Blake Miller’s new novel The Kuleshov Effect—‘was not only the freest person I knew—he was the only absolutely free person.’ … InThe Kuleshov Effect, Miller demonstrates this same freedom. This freedom is in everything—in the handling of the story, in the free artistic play with time and space. Nabokov rated the level of a reader—actually having in mind, of course, the level of the writer—by the quantity of details he could hold in his mind, and in this regard Miller is absolutely unrivaled in his descriptions of both American and Soviet reality. He masterfully conveys the most difficult innermost essence, the atmosphere of an age, right down to the smells. The detail in his descriptions at times approaches the level of hallucination, summoning the sense that before us is a recording of what has been seen and projected on a screen. And if the future reader wants someday to know what Leningrad-Petersburg looked like during and after the crash of the socialist economy, I couldn’t give better advice than to read Miller’s chapters about an American student’s visit to the Russian Nineties.”
– Andrei Khrzhanovsky, renowned Russian animator, director, now in exile, in a review of The Kuleshov Effect for Novaya Gazeta. Khrzhanovsky attended film school with Andrei Tarkovsky and Gennady Shpalikov, and Shpalikov wrote two of Khrzhanovsky’s films.
“The Kuleshov Effect is the ideal novel, the ‘ethereal colossus,’ to borrow a phrase Anna Akhmatova used to describe Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. In the multilevel construction of The Kuleshov Effect, the reader from time to time finds himself on the landing where he—along with the novel’s heroes—is sincerely worried about the fate of a a tiny gray furball, a kitten named Aelita, daughter of Pushkin(a) the Cat. This lyrical line illuminates the pages of the novel with an especially warm light. That’s not to say that the book is not sometimes cruel, ironic, and terrifyingly precise. Here you’ll find our—Russia’s— ‘hopeless optimism’ and ‘the faces of our new Soviet hypocrites, inflated to the point of bursting with declamatory patriotism’ … and our country, which ‘loved its fairy tales almost as much as it loved its lies’. And here you’ll also find Yuri Gagarin, who ‘show(ed) us—Russians, humans—what we’re capable of when we pause the bloodshed.’ These kinds of images, like the entire content and structure of The Kuleshov Effect, paint a portrait of the author, whose deep and empathetic understanding of Russian history and culture can only make the Russian-speaking reader proud. Why does he love us so? This is a mystery, without which, as we know, good art cannot exist.
– Andrei Khrzhanovsky
“Greg Blake Miller’s miracle of a book, The Kuleshov Effect, transported me back to my youth, all the more remarkably because a non-Russian had created a book that was a flying carpet to the Soviet cinematic 1960s, the land of Andrei Tarkovsky and Gennady Shpalikov. … Reading this remarkable novel about Shpalikov and the creation of the classic film The Illich Gate while re-watching various versions of the film, I suspected that The Kuleshov Effect actually came from the pen of the great Russian exile writer Dmitry Bykov, under the pen name of one of his many trickster doubles. The American author’s understanding of life is so absolutely Russian (and not in the imperial sense!) that I couldn’t shake my doubts. But my first hypothesis turned out to be wrong: Greg Blake Miller is real, an actual American. He’s even on Facebook!”
– Lilya Pann, longtime critic for Russia’s premier literary journal, Novy Mir.
“Achingly poignant. It’s been a long time since I cried over a book. The most unfathomable question is, how could an American write such a book? But Professor Miller has answered that question with The Kuleshov Effect.”
– Nikolai C., reader review of the Russian Edition, OZON.ru
“An outstanding, simply outstanding, book.”
– Arianne, reader review of the Russian Edition, OZON.ru
Back jacket copy for the Russian Edition, from Andrei Khrzhanovsky:
“This book does the impossible—it resurrects my beloved friends from the dawn of the Sixties. It resurrects them exactly as they were: ingenious, happy, tormented, beautiful, intolerable, and great. And the book itself resembles them—and is just as unpredictable.”
THE KULESHOV EFFECT has been excerpted in the prominent Russian-American journal Времена (Times), Volume 39, Issue 3, July 2026) and as an audio excerpt in Западное побережье (West Coast), Issue 18 (2026).
Reentry Shock 