Springfield
Debut novel by Sergey Davydov
Debut novel by Sergey Davydov
ORIGINAL TITLE: Спрингфилд
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Freedom Letters, 2023
159 PAGES
RIGHTS SOLD: French (Perspective Cavalière), Spanish (consonni)
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Freedom Letters, 2023
159 PAGES
RIGHTS SOLD: French (Perspective Cavalière), Spanish (consonni)
ENGLISH SAMPLE AVAILABLE
“We were sat in the queue for results. Next to us were some women who looked like cashiers from a corner shop, and a long-haul trucker with one brown arm, one white. In the furthest corner sat a middle-aged working-class gay couple, but they tried to pretend they didn’t know one another. We sat in identical poses and looked at memes on Matt’s phone, because Matt has a funny sense of humour. I was sweating. Matvei rubbed his pinky finger on mine gently, so I wasn’t afraid.“
A poignant story of coming of age as a young homosexual in a provincial town in modern-day Russia, and an unflinching portrayal of a lost generation of Russian youth that does not fit in, delivered in fluent, poetic and humorous writing.
Andrei and Matvei left their native industrial town of Togliatti for a bigger city in western Russia just to get away from their miserable families. Young, gay, and broke, their lives are a mix of comic and tragic absurdities, held together by the unfulfilled fantasies about a brighter future that is about to come but keeps getting delayed.
Coming of age in the setting of bleak post-Soviet small towns, student dorms and working-class suburbs, where queers and renegades find each other in the smoking rooms of a provincial college, Davydov’s characters learn to survive in a hostile and desperate environment by holding on to their wide-eyed dreams of California, gallows humor and love — a hidden pocket of trust, authenticity, and spontaneity.
Andrei and Matvei left their native industrial town of Togliatti for a bigger city in western Russia just to get away from their miserable families. Young, gay, and broke, their lives are a mix of comic and tragic absurdities, held together by the unfulfilled fantasies about a brighter future that is about to come but keeps getting delayed.
Coming of age in the setting of bleak post-Soviet small towns, student dorms and working-class suburbs, where queers and renegades find each other in the smoking rooms of a provincial college, Davydov’s characters learn to survive in a hostile and desperate environment by holding on to their wide-eyed dreams of California, gallows humor and love — a hidden pocket of trust, authenticity, and spontaneity.
Springfield tells more about what it means to be a queer person in Russia than any other book ever published in Russian.
— Lisa Birger, Meduza
An important event in Russian literature.
— Konstantin Kropotkin, Gorky Media
Springfield is a landmark in queer Russian literature. It weaves the real and the imaginary to powerful and provocative ends, in a text that manages to offer both a fresh and vital reflection on the vulnerabilities and invisibility of queer people in Russia, and a psychological dive into how marginalisation can bear painful but fantastic ways of perceiving and inhabiting the world.
— Dr Nick Mayhew, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Glasgow