Night Roads

Gaito Gazdanov belongs to that circle of Russian writers whose work was long unknown in Russia. Joining the White movement after the revolution, he never returned to his homeland, sharing the fate of many Russian emigrants. Living in Paris, he worked as a dockworker, a locomotive washer, a laborer, and a taxi driver. His first stories were published in the Parisian magazine "Will of Russia," and his first novel, which immediately brought the author success, was published in Paris in 1929. Early Gazdanov was compared to Proust, Dostoevsky, and Kafka, while his later work was compared to Albert Camus, Julien Green, and Mario Soldati. After the war, Gazdanov worked for many years at Radio Liberty, and his broadcasts on classical and contemporary Russian literature gathered hundreds of listeners. The novel "Night Roads" (1941) is not only an outstanding work of literature but also one of the few genuinely truthful testimonies of real events and the spiritual history of the Russian emigration.