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Alessandro Barbero. Romanzo russo: "Fiutando i futuro supplizi" Milan. Mondadori. 1998. 500 pages. L.33,000. ISBN 88-04-45063-0.
While most Italian novels these days average about 200 pages, Alessandro Barbero, in the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian literature, offers us a work two-and-a-half times longer, And if it were not for the fact that the novel is written in Italian, one would totally be transported to Russia.
Romanzo russo is set in the Soviet Union of the late 1980s, the time of perestroika and glasnost'. Tan.1a, a Moscow University student, is working on a dissertation whose topic may be too hot to handle for the political leaders of Azerbaijan, where she is forced to travel to do her research. A parallel investigation into the murder of a Muslim religious leader leads Lappa, ajudge, to the same...