"Like Nabokov at his best, Gazdanov teases his reader to trace the sometimes parallel yet often intersecting narrative layers, reminding us again that to read literature means, in many ways, to lose one’s mind." - Andrew Marzoni, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"Gaito Gazdanov’s elegantly crafted Proustian novel delves into the eternal ideas of life, death, and identity." - World Literature Today

"A masterpiece of modern literature... I haven't read such a humanely fine and moving novel about the great twentieth century Ice Age of the Soul in a long time." - Iris Radisch, Die Zeit

"Gaito Gazdanov's compelling, clear, extremely civilised language breaks the resistance of even the most reluctant reader and most obstinate iPhone-addict. ... We decadent Westerners, who are finally allowed to read Gazdanov ... love his contemporary narratory style - because it's now action, now reflection, and at the end there is always a perfect, but uncontrived, solution as in an HBO-series. ... Gazdanov teaches us - with each line of his beautiful, sad, ambivalent prose that always drifts into the essayistic - to love our beautiful, broken, neurotic lives." - Maxim Biller, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

"Fantastic, clever, precise and so thrilling, and at the same time modern in a cool way ... The Spectre of Alexander Wolf is a novel which can change your life. If you're prepared for the trip." - Georg Diez, Kultur SPIEGEL

"A stroke of luck for the reader ... a novel which, on few pages, in scenes which one cannot quickly forget, deals with forlornness, enjoyment, distraction, with love, death and coincidence - all that, which makes the human life beautiful and unbearable ... A vase flies, shots ring out: and there we stand, in our hands the book of an author whose name we didn't know until now. Already it's a favourite book." - Jens Bisky, Süddeutsche Zeitung

"How each of us forms his memories is the theme of this novel. Rarely has one read about it as elegantly, as deeply and despite everything so comfortingly as here." - Tilman Spreckelsen, Frankfurter Allgemeine

"The Spectre of Alexander Wolf becomes a study of the soul in the zone of death, written with a fine criminological sense, churning us up, gripping, exciting.', Andreas Puff-Trojan, Die Welt'Of course, you sense yourself that you are very talented. And I want to add that you are talented in your own, very special way. I can say this with some justification, because I have read not only An Evening with Claire, but also some of your short stories." - Maxim Gorky

"What saved Gazdanov as a person was Gazdanov the writer, who in his art transformed the unbearable reality of his life, his time and the society in which he lived - not into a falsified, tacky image or into a philistine dream of a wonderful life, but into a metaphysical scream, which, because of its intensity and its sincerity, sounds into the deepest reaches of the human soul and moves and satisfies us through the power of its expression. In this sense Gazdanov's artistic style grants the 'wonderful life' the shape of reality, of life, as it should be and as it only exists in art." - Laszlo Dienes

"If Proust had been a Russian taxi driver in Paris in the 1930s..." - L’Express

"A work of great potency ... it punches very much above its weight, and I have a hunch that what's in it will stay with you for the rest of your life." - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

"A mystery ... multilayered ... this is an original at work." - George Szirtes, The Times

"Quick-paced, taut prose ... rendered beautifully in Karetnyk's accomplished new translation." - Ivan Juritz, Independent on Sunday

"Elegantly eerie ... devastatingly atmospheric ... cool, wonderfully fraught." - Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times




"Splendidly translated... a mini-masterpiece." - Star Tribune

"Gazdanov's work is the perfect fusion of the Russian tradition and French innovation." - LRB

GAITO GAZDANOV (1903-1971) joined the White Army aged just sixteen and fought in the Russian Civil War. Exiled in Paris from the 1920s onwards, he eventually became a nocturnal taxi-driver and gained prominence on the literary scene as a novelist, essayist, critic and short-story writer. The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, The Beggar and Other Stories, The Buddha's Return and The Flight are also published by Pushkin Press.