Ice blue blood

Yury Buida is one of the most distinctive contemporary Russian writers. He is now being introduced to Czech readers for the first time with the novel Ice-Blue Blood (2011), which follows the fates of the inhabitants of the small provincial town of Chudov from the revolutionary era to the 1990s. From a magical mosaic of comical and cruel episodes emerges the story of actress Ida Zmoiro, loosely based on the incredible life of the famous Soviet film star Valentina Karavayeva.

Like her real-life counterpart, her fictional double becomes famous during the war for her role as the naive Mashenka in the film of the same name, winning the hearts of the soldiers at the front and of Stalin himself. However, a tragic car accident scars her face, and she later falls out of favour and has to return to her hometown, where time has stood still. But she never ceases to long for the stage, and so, in solitude, she creates dozens of recordings of her beloved roles... Buida masterfully captures the grey and cruel reality of the Stalinist and Soviet eras, transforming it into a colourful carnival of images and characters; he creates a unique fictional world in which the boundaries between life and theatre are blurred. In his prose, he combines the best tradition of the great novel with Gogolian hyperbole and Bulgakovian magic.