ENG / RUS
125×200 (84×108/32) hard cover, ill., 688 pp., 2011 ISBN 978‑5‑86793‑877‑2 Rights sold: Polish language
Sergeant Pepper, by the famous rock musician Vadim Demidov, is an adventurous, social-psychological and partly satirical story about the brave and dramatic history of the popular rock group Khronop at the very end of the Soviet regime. Demidov precisely recreates the special energy of the artistic underground of those years.
A love of music, a desire for freedom, the belief in a dream and the brotherhood of people united in opposition to an all-powerful regime – all this comes together in an amusing and entertaining narrative.
The atmosphere of a closed Soviet city in the 1980s is conveyed so vividly that readers feel as though they are living in Gorky, surrounded on all sides by a concrete wall through which the air of freedom can never enter. Behind this wall, beyond the rows of barbed wire, are youngsters who read Cortázar and Hemingway and trade vinyl rock records at an illegal market on weekends. They dream about the release of joint albums with Phil Collins and Mick Jagger, and about writing and playing authentic live music that is not dictated by the system. It was in this context that Khronop emerged. The sequel novel, Where Angels Fall, is set at the end of the 2000s, but is also unavoidably about the wild 1990s. It tells of the fate of the intellectuals who were once part of the underground, but its author is not relating this second-hand – the people on which the characters are based are Demidov himself and his friends from his youth, and the stories that make up the normal are in many cases drawn from real life.
Vadim Demidov (b. 1961) is a musician, journalist and writer. He is the longtime songwriter and vocalist for Khronop, a Nizhny Novgorod group active for four decades (six Khronop albums have been released by the Soyuz/Zenith record label).
At first glance the prose is relatively simple, but that is only an initial impression, and not the most reliable. After something like the 33rd or 45th page the reader realizes that he is inside and among the characters, in the coffee-, alcohol- and nicotine-fueled heart of things. This feeling of being present is something very important – very few achieve it, and nine times out of 10 it signifies that the author has achieved his goal. He has captured us, stolen us.
Zakhar Prilepin
The decline and fall of a great empire told through the history of rock ’n’ roll. An isolated country, a closed city, "closed" yet also receptive to a radical change of pace, of music, as well as to a new kind of person - Khronops. They were a reflection of a decade, the 1980s, and marched forward into the new country that emerged from it – into the strange 1990s and 2000s, and perhaps to a new realism? Most importantly, their music rang out. It was superb music, because this is Vadim Demidov’s forte. Andrei Rudalev, litlife.ru
