Colonel Liapkin

Exiled from Russia after the Revolution, Colonel Liapkin arrives in the provincial Greek city of Larissa carrying little besides the demons and habits of a vanished world. Proud, mysterious, and strangely intriguing, he attempts to fashion a new life at the Farm School outside the city, surrounded as much by the pretensions of teachers, directors, and Larissa’s beau monde as by the earthy pragmatism of the local peasantry. Yet as memories of the old order fade, Liapkin finds himself increasingly unable to adapt to the world around him, master his addictions, or understand who, exactly, he is in this new provincial environment. Drawing on his childhood in Thessaly, Karagatsis, one of the great modern Greek novelists, evokes interwar Greece with striking immediacy: the heat and dust of the plains, the uneasy glamour of provincial society, and a Europe caught between old empires, new ideologies, and the seductive promise of modernity. At once comic and melancholy, sensual and unsparing, Colonel Liapkin is one of the great novels of exile, as compelling today as ever—a timeless portrait of the longing for home and the unsettling possibility that it may no longer exist.