"I met Sergei Lebedev ... There was something indomitable about him that made me think about an animal that won’t let go of something when it gets its teeth into it. Lebedev’s books dealt with history — it lay like a shadow over everything he wrote — and the fact that its presence was so powerful suggested that the conflicts and tensions inherent in it were still unresolved, still had a bearing on Russian society in obscure yet palpable ways."

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Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New York Times Magazine