The Town of N

In his enthusiastic introduction to this lost work, translator Borden calls the rediscovery of Dobychin (who died in 1936, probably by his own hand, after being scorned by the Soviet literary establishment) ""the single most significant revelation in Russian letters during glasnost."" Dobychin left only a brief body of work, principally this tightly composed, satirical novel published in 1935 and promptly forgotten. It follows the naively credulous stream-of-consciousness of a boy from age seven in 1901 until he is 15, and it skewers, in the manner of Gogol's Dead Souls, the pretensions and oppressions of the provincial society in which he lives, including religious orthodoxy, pompous schoolmasters, rampant sexism and hypocrisy. Indeed, the title is the fictional setting of Gogol's masterpiece, and many of the nicknames that the boy narrator gives to characters derive from that book. Without apparent reflection, in a series of choppy perceptions and associations, the boy relates events of his school years, father's death, readings, mild crushes and the eruption of the Russo-Japanese War, while Dobychin provides the irony. Lovers of Russian literature owe a debt of gratitude to Borden for bringing this important work to the attention of English readers. (Aug.)