Leningrad, 1978. Irina, a soprano with dreams of greatness, approaches Walid, an Algerian student tracing Napoleon’s footsteps in Russia, outside the entrance to the Hermitage Museum. She asks him to help her get to the “Little Italian Room”, where a strange painting by Caravaggio is on display, without having to queue. Then she disappeared. He falls in love with Russian opera, hoping to find the beautiful stranger. This is the beginning of a long love story that will outlast Walid’s forty-year absence, as he is forced to leave the country in a hurry, until he returns to St. Petersburg in February 2022 in search of Irina.
Continuing his novelistic exploration of the tragedies of the 20th century, Anouar Benmalek takes us, through the fate of Irina’s grandfather Vladimir, into the dark history of the USSR in Kazakhstan in the 1930s. At the peak of his art, he uses an exceptional imagination and powerful language to write these lives that tell of the splendor and misery of the great Russia. A highly topical text.
