Passport to Yesterday

Overview

A moving and ambitious novel, this story concerns an exiled Soviet musician who finds himself back in his homeland and drawn to his hometown—and the secret of his father’s disappearance during World War II. Gifted young violinist Oleg Nemets' rural life is overturned in the storm of the Second World War and the repressive regime that succeeds it. Blown far away from his home and a father who never returned from the front, Oleg lands in San Francisco as a violinist in the symphony orchestra. But years later, when the orchestra tours the Soviet Union, a series of events and clues from his past lead him back to his old town, the story of his father's disappearance and the Russia he left behind.

Reviews

"The translator, Thomas Moore, has shortened the Russian title from Visa to The Day Before Yesterday, and this is not our only debt of gratitude to him: he has done a good job of conveying Druzhnikov’s deceptively simple prose with its ironies and hints of unstated emotion." —Financial Times

"These characters are more than alive. They are our relatives, members of our family, neighbours. It’s a strange, unusual, mysterious impression." —Heinrich Böll

"Slender, delicate and written in a voice that manages to combine plainness and poetry, horror and humour, in a quite extraordinary way." —Literary Review

Author Biography

Yuri Druzhnikov is a professor at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of a number of works of fiction and non-fiction and he was nominated by Poland for the Nobel prize.