The Beggar and Other Stories

Author Gaito Gazdanov

Translated by Bryan Karetnyk

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Translated for the first time, the best short stories by the 'modernist master' Gazdanov, author of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf.

In a Metro underpass, bald and dressed in rags, stands a silent beggar. In the evening, he walks the deserted streets of Paris; at night, he sleeps in a small, foetid crate vacated by the death of another beggar. He is poor and he is ill, but, on reflection, he is free.

Never published before in English, this marvellously translated collection of tightly written, lyrical works represent marvellously compact miniatures of all the major strands that Gazdanov explores in his novels. The senselessness of life, the nature of fate, and the richness of the inner life - these brilliant and moving…

$24.00

September 25, 2018

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Gaito Gazdanov (Georgi Ivanovich Gazdanov, 1903-1971) was the son of a forester. Born in St Petersburg and brought up in Siberia and Ukraine, he joined Baron Wrangel's White Army in 1919 aged just sixteen, and fought in the Russian Civil War until the Army's evacuation from the Krimea in 1920. After a brief sojourn in Gallipoli and Contantinople (where he completed secondary school), he moved to Paris, where he spent eight years variously working as a docker, washing locomotives, and in the Citroën factory. During periods of unemployment, he slept on park benches or in the Métro. In 1928, he became a taxi driver, working nights, which enabled him to write and to attend lectures at the Sorbonne during the…