Springfield
Debut novel by Sergey Davydov
Debut novel by Sergey Davydov
ORIGINAL TITLE: Спрингфилд
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Freedom Letters, 2023
159 PAGES
RIGHTS SOLD: Danish (Silkefyret), French (Perspective Cavalière), German (Luftschacht Verlag), Spanish (Consonni)
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Freedom Letters, 2023
159 PAGES
RIGHTS SOLD: Danish (Silkefyret), French (Perspective Cavalière), German (Luftschacht Verlag), 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.
A first love on the margins of a queer, uprooted and marginal Russia.
— El País
An important event in Russian literature.
— 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