A School for Fools
  • Published: 15 December 2015
  • ISBN: 9781590178461
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $35.00

A School for Fools

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An elegant, dreamy exploration of memory, art, and madness, Sasha Sokolov's School for Fools was a favorite of Nabokov's and is now available in a brand new translation.

By turns lyrical and philosophical, witty and baffling, A School for Fools confounds all expectations of the novel. Here we find not one reliable narrator but two “unreliable” narrators: the young man who is a student at the “school for fools” and his double. What begins as a reverie (with frequent interruptions) comes to seem a sort of fairy-tale quest not for gold or marriage but for self-knowledge. The currents of consciousness running through the novel are passionate and profound. Memories of childhood summers at the dacha are contemporaneous with the present, the dead are alive, and the beloved is present in the wind. Here is a tale either of madness or of the life of the imagination in conversation with reason, straining at the limits of language; in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, “an enchanting, tragic, and touching book.”
  • Published: 15 December 2015
  • ISBN: 9781590178461
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $35.00
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Praise for A School for Fools

"An enchanting, tragic, and touching work." --Vladimir Nabokov

"[A School for Fools] will undoubtedly come to be recognized as one of the great classics of Russian prose." --Newsweek

"The voice is amazingly sensitive and imaginative, gloriously lucid of language and full of broad comedy and whimsical wit. For all its gloominess, this strange novel is a celebration of life." --The Washington Post

"A lyrical vision of extraordinary intensity. Sokolov is an astounding new voice." --Chicago Daily News

"A puzzling and wonderful book. The novel is an anti-authoritarian statement, a compassionate cry for understanding of those who are different, the nonconformists of any society who must find their own way." --The Kansas City Star

"One of the most original and talented works to emerge from the Soviet Union in many years." --The Times Literary Supplement