Gelasimov embraces the “show, don’t tell” dictum effectively throughout this short novel from the unique start. The first person narrator, later identified as Constantine or Kostya, has just returned to his home and is trying to fit a lot of bottles of vodka into his refrigerator, and on the window sill, on the floor, in the bathroom and clothes hamper. He’s planning a bender after having done some sort of work, work he’d completed to buy vodka. . . .

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Olga Slavnikova’s ‘2017,’ set on the anniversary of the revolution, is so packed full of ideas and images it threatens to explode.

And, she goes on to say,

Slavnikova’s strange, genre-defying novel, winner of the 2006 Russian Booker Prize, finally made it into English in Marian Schwartz’s luminous translation.

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In November 2007, hundreds of Russians filled the streets of Moscow to protest against Vladimir Putin, even though their government had made public demonstrations illegal. Valery Panyushkin, one of the nation’s most outspoken journalists, spoke with a dozen of those protestors for 12 Who Don’t Agree, including world chess champion Garry Kasparov, to draw out the personal accounts of what inspired them to take a stand… and how they fared against the inevitable crackdown.

Olga Slavnikova, 2017 (Overlook, 2010, trans. from Russian by Marian Schwartz). The "most difficult-to-classify book of the year." Enjoyed without grasping its entirety, which was part of the enjoyment. Michael Froggatt, in his review (Strange Horizons, October 1, 2010), gets it precisely right: "Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, the winner of the 2006 Russian Booker Prize, is a novel which confounds the reader at every turn: its prose style, characterization and narrative consistently refuse to conform to expectations. It stubbornly refuses to depict people or events in a way which recognizably reflects real life…"

It wouldn’t be summer if I didn’t pick up a Russian novel.  Though I received my review copy of 2017 by Olga Slavnikova back in March, I decided to save it for summer.  Instead of dipping my brain into Lit  Light, I prefer the dark, soulfulness of Russian Lit during the blazing heat (or cool fog) of summer. (There must be a support group for people like me).
  
My favorite Russian translator, Marian Schwartz, did the translation for this 2006 Book prize winning novel.  True to form, she lets the Russian language penetrate each English line.  This leads to moments of intense lyricism …

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Olga Slavnikova’s profound new novel 2017 evokes, with uncanny vividness, a Russia of the near-future in which a character reasonably wonders  “…how much about human beings is human?” . . .

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