Maria Reva’s Good Citizens Need Not Fear is a superb debut: wry, unexpected, beautifully crafted, and mordantly funny. Nine interconnected stories follow the fates of several hapless Ukrainians who live at 1933 Ivansk Street, a ten-storey apartment block built atop a marsh in Kirovka. The narrative is divided into two parts —“Before the Fall” and “After the Fall”— which extend from the 1980s through the collapse of the Soviet Union. Characters disappear and reappear, a technique that makes the book read like a suite of stories that wants to be a novel.
According to municipal directories, the building at 1933 Ivansk Street does not exist. Nonetheless, residents carry on with their lives. They sew fur coats, make illegal phonograph records, and keep a neighbourly eye on each other’s business. On the fifth floor, fourteen members of Daniil Petrovich Blinov’s family squeeze into his tiny apartment. Konstantyn, a poet who lives with his wife, Milena, on...
Allan Hepburn is the James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University.
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