The Competent Authority

Darkly comic, The Competent Authority is about the KGB's hunt for a dissident writer they could not for years track down.

Format: Hardback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 26 October 2023
Publisher: Welbeck Publishing Group

The Soviet Union, a vast empire with warm entrails, is truly great. However, whispers of dissent are spreading in its territories, and texts published in the West are circulating in samizdat, tormenting the secret police. Lieutenant Ivanov of the K.G.B., under pressure from his enraged superiors, is handed the case. Leads emerge, flare up, and vanish. Years pass. Abram Tertz publishes another short story, a new novel, mocking the competent authority. Shielded by his fierce wife Maria Vasilyevna Rozanova, Andrei Sinyavsky, one of the Soviet Union's most renowned and brilliant figures of resistance, waits in his wired apartment, drinking, sure his days as a free man are numbered. But as Rozanova continues to taunt Ivanov with her cheerful intransigence, a crisis of confidence opens up within the regime's resolve, causing the young lieutenant to wonder, are we actually as competent as we claim to be?

With the unique insight afforded by his mother, Rozanova, Gran pays remarkable homage to Andrei Sinyavsky, his father, reimagining the six long years leading up to his infamous arrest, trial, and conviction. Framed within a riveting cat-and-mouse dynamic; irreverent and darkly comic, Gran balances a satirical lightness with deeper meditations on dogma and freedom of expression, state control, and creative resistance, the ghosts of which, at a time when political criticism is being crushed once again, are as present today as ever before.

Weight: 394g
Dimension: 144 x 224 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781914495557