Shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Russian Novel Prize
Aleshkovsky's is an important voice... in contemporary Russian fiction. He makes use of Gogolean satire, the folk tale, the chronicle, and even the saint's life. Throughout the novel he steers a steady course between sentimentality and cynicism, and maintains a creative tension between custom and circumstance, typicality and eccentricity. - Times Literary Supplement
Aleshkovsky has a vivid style and a fresh vision of his homeland, which still has the ring of the country which Leskov and Dostoevsky explored so unforgettably. This is the real thing: real literature about real people in Russia as it really is.- Martin Dewhurst
Skunk: a Life is part of the search for values in the post-Soviet moral vacuum. This is a curiously Russian Bildungsroman. The setting is the Russian North, where authentic Russian moral values are believed still to survive in remote places. 'Skunk' is the nickname of a boy born out of wedlock to an alcoholic eighteen-year-old girl.
Aleshkovsky's is an important voice... in contemporary Russian fiction. He makes use of Gogolean satire, the folk tale, the chronicle, and even the saint's life. Throughout the novel he steers a steady course between sentimentality and cynicism, and maintains a creative tension between custom and circumstance, typicality and eccentricity. - Times Literary Supplement
Aleshkovsky has a vivid style and a fresh vision of his homeland, which still has the ring of the country which Leskov and Dostoevsky explored so unforgettably. This is the real thing: real literature about real people in Russia as it really is.- Martin Dewhurst
Skunk: a Life is part of the search for values in the post-Soviet moral vacuum. This is a curiously Russian Bildungsroman. The setting is the Russian North, where authentic Russian moral values are believed still to survive in remote places. 'Skunk' is the nickname of a boy born out of wedlock to an alcoholic eighteen-year-old girl.