"The Burn is an ambitious attempt to capture the spirt of the Moscow intelligentsia of the '60's, when Moscow was alive with new ideas and new talent, as well as with casual sex and heavy drinking. It has amplitude, a rich and free language, a raw ecstacy which accurately reflects the uninhibited mood of those days."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"Bitter, mocking yet filled with jazzy exuberance, The Burn takes readers on a wild ride through the paradoxical, often phantasmagoric, world of Russian intellectuals, who love and hate the whorehouse- Motherland ... A dazzling, hypnotic performance."
-Newsweek

"A supremely ambitious work worthy of a great tradition, it makes Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago seem sentimental and much of Solzhenitsyn's fiction wooden in comparison ... The Burn will be read and pondered, debated and studied, for as long as literature has admirers."
-New York Times

Translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny