Devil’s Midnight

August 1919: the Red Army is making its final, triumphant surge across the tortured remains of the old Russian Empire. For the defiantly apolitical artists and aesthetes at the heart of this story, it is a time of disruption and apocalypse, their lives pulled between narrow escapes, desperate intimacy, and horrific violence. Alexey Lebedev, the son of a celebrated Russian painter recently martyred by the Bolsheviks, is driven deep into the conflict by a dizzying spiral of chance encounters and impulsive decisions. Colonel Yuri Skatchko, a former stage director abandons the theatre to serve as the brave but reckless commander of Our Homeland, a battered ammunition train that comes to represent, both symbolically and literally, the last hope of the White resistance. Nata Tai, the former glamorous and seductive queen of Russian cinema, is busy waging her own private war with the ruthless remnants of a notorious satanic cabal. Kapralov depicts the desperate struggles of his characters with a perfect balance of intensity and nonchalance. In the end, the conflicts, both personal and political, converge toward a final showdown in the frozen shadows of the Caucasus, with Russia herself surviving as the novel’s real hero, a place of darkness and mystery and hope.