The Island of Crimea

Written in 1979, Vassily Aksyonov’s The Island of Crimea imagines an alternative history (abetted by alternative geography — Crimea is a peninsula) wherein the Russian civil war ends with the tsarist forces able to hold onto this southern scrap of the old empire. Skip forward sixty years, and Crimea is a booming Hong Kong to the U.S.S.R.’s China. To the contemporary Soviet reader, almost every word in that opening sentence invited giggles of dizzy disorientation.

• Author
• Vasily Aksyonov, Vasily Aksyonov

• Format
• hardcover

• Pages
• 369

• Publisher
• Random House

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 9780394727653

• Settings
• Crimea

• Genres
• russia, fiction, dystopia, classics, unfinished

• Release date
• 1983