Red Crosses

Sasha Filipenko traces the arc of Russian history from Stalin’s terror to the present day, in a novel full of heart and humanity.

One struggles not to forget, while the other would like nothing better. Tatiana Alexeyevna is an old woman, over ninety, rich in lived experience, and suffering from Alzheimer’s. Every day, she loses a few more of her irreplaceable memories. Alexander is a young man whose life has been brutally torn in two.

Tatiana tells her young neighbor her life story, a story that encompasses the entire Russian 20th century with all its horrors and hard-won humanity. Little by little, the old woman and the young man forge an unlikely friendship and make a pact against forgetting.

Sasha Filipenko, born in Minsk in 1984, is a Belarusian author who writes in Russian. After abandoning his classical music training, he studied literature in St. Petersburg and worked as a journalist, screenwriter and author for a satire show. Sasha Filipenko lives in St. Petersburg.

Brian James Baer is the founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies. He is the translator of Stories by Mikhail Zhvanetsky and Not Just Brodsky by Sergei Dovlatov, and the author of the monograph Other Russias (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Ellen Vayner has translated short stories, magazine interviews, and a conceptual artistic project. Her first full-length translation was Sacred Darkness.