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Life and Death Under Soviet Rule
by Igort
Written and illustrated by an award-winning artist and translated into English for the first time, Igort's The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks is a collection of two harrowing works of graphic nonfiction about life under Russian foreign rule.
After spending two years in Ukraine and Russia, collecting the stories of the survivors and witnesses to Soviet rule, masterful Italian graphic novelist Igort was compelled to illuminate two shadowy moments in recent history: the Ukraine famine and the assassination of a Russian journalist. Now he brings those stories to new life with in-depth reporting and deep compassion.
In The Russian Notebooks, Igort investigates the murder of award-winning journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkoyskaya. Anna spoke out frequently against the Second Chechen War, criticizing Vladimir Putin. For her work, she was detained, poisoned, and ultimately murdered. Igort follows in her tracks, detailing Anna's assassination and the stories of abuse, murder, abduction, and torture that Russia was so desperate to censor. In The Ukrainian Notebooks, Igort reaches further back in history and illustrates the events of the 1932 Holodomor. Little known outside of the Ukraine, the Holodomor was a government-sanctioned famine, a peacetime atrocity during Stalin's rule that killed anywhere from 1.8 to twelve million ethnic Ukrainians. Told through interviews with the people who lived through it, Igort paints a harrowing picture of hunger and cruelty under Soviet rule.
With elegant brush strokes and a stark color palette, Igort has transcribed the words and emotions of his subjects, revealing their intelligence, humanity, and honesty - and exposing the secret world of the former USSR.
"Starred Review. A work that ranks with the best journalism and the finest graphic artistry." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Celebrated Italian comic artist Igort (5 Is the Perfect Number) has produced an impressive work of investigative journalism spanning nearly a century of brutality in the former Soviet Union, little of it known in the West. Although the layouts and citations are occasionally muddled, this does not diminish the stark horrors depicted." - Publishers Weekly
"Moody, mysterious, and cinematic...Igort is one of Italy's great cartoonists." - Adrian Tombine
This information about The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Igort (born Igor Tuveri in 1958, in Cagliari, Sardinia) is an Italian comics artist and illustrator. He has written thirteen graphic novels and has been published in fifteen languages. In 2000 he founded and directed the publishing house Coconino Press, based in Bologna.
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