Sisters of the Cross

Alexei Remizov Roger Keys (Translator) Brian Murphy (Translator)

Columbia University Press (DECEMBER) Hardcover $30 (192pp) 978-0-231-18542-4

In gorgeous prose, the novel blends together seemingly disparate narratives to form a harmonious whole.

In Sisters of the Cross, Alexei Remizov captures the strata of human experiences via evocative imagery and scintillating language.

An unassuming and meticulous clerk, Piotr Alekseevich Marakulin, is fired when a mistake is found in his books. Left to wonder if someone has set him up to fail, he is forced to scrape by on odd jobs. A combination of his inner and outer landscapes form the stage for Marakulin’s psychological and spiritual development.

His room in Burkov House places him in the midst of a menagerie of characters, mainly women. The wizened Akumovna tells fortunes with playing cards and “rolls around the earth” to escape a traumatic past. Adoniia idolizes living saints and seeks them out whenever possible. Verochka, the target of Marakulin’s unrequited love, is determined to assert herself in Russian theater, but instead traverses the path of prostitution. Such women exert a profound influence over Marakulin as he wrestles with existential questions and economic hardship.

In gorgeous prose, the novel blends together the seemingly disparate narratives of its individual characters to form a harmonious whole. The narrative sings of age-old dichotomies—rich and poor, truth and illusion, love and lust. Phrases, sentences, and even entire paragraphs occasionally resurface throughout, like motifs in a symphony of human suffering.