Multiple Personalities is a dreamlike novella by Tatyana Shcherbina, one of Russia’s most distinctive contemporary writers, translated into English by Melanie Moore. After years in a coma, a woman wakes determined to lead a normal life. Instead she finds herself slipping in and out of time, wandering through history in her imagination as if it were her back garden, while her friends live through the upheavals that have remade Russia over the past decades.
In Shcherbina’s hands, life is a masquerade whose guests are characters out of classic world literature, racing towards a destination unknown, and the notion that time flows neatly from past to future may be the strangest fiction of all.
“An intriguing novella that uses the idea of split personalities as a metaphor for not only life under the Soviets, but also for the confusion of contemporary life in post-Soviet Russia,” wrote Lisa Hill of ANZ LitLovers. “Slightly dreamy, and certainly convoluted, with several inspired episodes,” added M.A. Orthofer in the complete review. Shcherbina began by self-publishing her work to avoid Soviet censorship and is today one of Russia’s most celebrated female writers. A singular work of Russian literature in translation.
