'A tantalising mystery... a mesmerising work of literature' - Antony Beevor
'Truly troubling, a weird meditation on death, war and sex' - Paris Review
A superb early postmodern classic by one of Nabokov's fellow émigré writers, rediscovered after more than half a century. A man comes across a short story which recounts in minute detail his killing of a soldier, long ago - from the victim's point of view. It's a story that should not exist, and whose author can only be a dead man. So begins the strange quest for its elusive writer: 'Alexander Wolf'.
A singular classic, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf is a psychological thriller and existential inquiry into guilt and redemption, coincidence and fate, love and death.
Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.
Translated by Bryan Karetnyk
Gaito Gazdanov (1903-1971) joined the White Army aged just sixteen and fought in the Russian Civil War.
Exiled in Paris from the 1920s onwards, he eventually became a nocturnal taxi-driver and quickly gained prominence on the literary scene as a novelist, essayist, critic and short-story writer, and was greatly acclaimed by Maxim Gorky, among others.