PERMAFROST

Viktor Remizov (author) and Franziska Zwerg (translator from Russian) in conversation about the novel PERMAFROST (EUROPA PUBLISHING HOUSE)

Viktor Remizov spent more than seven years writing his great novel: In line with Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy, his epic PERMAFROST is about human fates around  the “Stalin Railway”, a gigantic project of the aging Soviet dictator. Between 1949 and 1953, Gulag prisoners in the Arctic Circle built a railway line that was to connect the lower part of the river Yenisei with the Northern Urals over a distance of one and a half thousand kilometers. PERMAFROST is based on historical facts and draws on material from the human rights organization Memorial, which is now banned in Russia. Despite its system-critical content, the book has been a bestseller in Russia since its publication

It tells the story of several families. It is about being human and remaining human at turning points in history, but also about the relationship with nature.