The latest addition to my website is Sergei Lebedev‘s Титан (A Present Past: Titan and Other Chronicles). This is not a novel but, as Lebedev says in his introduction, the stories are based on his and others’ reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union and share a mystical topography in which the legacy of totalitarian regimes is ever-present. Some of the stories expose the dark underbelly of both Soviet and post-Soviet Russia but many of them (but by no means all) have what might be described as a mystical element where strange things happen or objects have strange powers or the past suddenly pops up in the present. Some of them are more realistic – a corrupt judge, a mimic blackmailed into working for the KGB or a dissident writer returning from a labour camp still carefully watched by the KGB to see if we will carry on writing and even a singer outwitting an official of the fictitious Khitanese embassy. The stories are different , very well told, very original and almost certainly not part of Putin’s bedtime reading.