Published in Diario de Mallorca, 09 July 2026:​

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By Ramona Pérez

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Artem Mozgovoy was born in 1985 in Siberia. His father and mother were engineers, and they lived in a very small apartment; he cannot explain why, in a country with a spectacularly low population density, the Government aims to take advantage of the space and make people live in crowded conditions. He is a young man of special sensitivity who finds complicity in his relationship with his mother, a woman who, due to the circumstances of a very difficult childhood, has become a person of impeccable kindness, intelligence and ability to react; on the other hand, his father is a man trapped by tradition whose inertia makes him a coward. We meet his paternal grandmother, who lives in a house and cultivates a vegetable garden; in this space, her sensitivity and capacity to welcome and love are evident, it is the “paradise” that the narrator has found... The grandmother’s God is not Lenin, on the refrigerator there is an image of Christ.

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Changes begin in the country: the parents quit their jobs, open a shop, they believe that they are facing a different future; the grandparents do not believe it... everything is a mirage, life is increasingly difficult. Nothing makes the mother waver, and she goes ahead; they leave with her son to a larger town, there he will be able to go to a prestigious school to prepare for university. We are surprised by the level of the teenager, in an oral exam, when they talk about Nikolai Gogol, he knows how to go into details typical of a specialist; this young man has already made the acquisition of knowledge as a way of life, he loves literature, he has lived with the classics since he was a child. There is a moment when his father suggests readings that he cannot bear. He has already accessed the great names of Russian literature when his father tells him that no one reads War and Peace; he replies that, if that is the case, he will be the one.

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In adolescence, he lives a great love story. His colleague Andrei, a young man of extraordinary abilities, makes exemplary analyzes of the politics they have to live through and of the history that has preceded them. His parents are KGB agents and they themselves betray him. At a very young age, he already lost his horizons, moving around Moscow completely defeated, with no chance of survival.

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We meet a teacher, of great prestige within the high school, who systematically practices sexual abuse with the students; passionate professors who have not lost the ability to transmit knowledge; people who, against all logic, have an intimate space that the system has not yet violated, this is the case of the English teacher, former colleague of the mother.

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The narrator will have the opportunity to spend a period abroad. There is the possibility that, out of almost two thousand students, five may leave the country to spend a stay in North America; he has the academic and English level, he has trained on his own since childhood, only at the end will he attend some classes; getting the essential support of a teacher also means having to suffer an abuse of power.

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Primavera a Siberia goes beyond classifications, delves into politics, anthropology, society and ways of life. The author manages to delve into his present, and he does so with objectivity.

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The work was written in 2014, at the age of 29; he did it in English – it could not be otherwise, such an impeccable reflection could not be written in Russian – and it has been translated into different languages. It has the characteristics of an essential classic, it leads us to understand a reality of which every day we receive versions that confuse us, it tells us about the pain of people who are rejected because of their sexuality, it tells us about kindness without measure, when it introduces us to the grandmother; of resilience when we meet the mother; of people unable to react, of the pain in front of young people like Andrei, the first love, a boy of exuberant intelligence, passionate and brave, to whom the fanaticism of the parents themselves leads to destruction.

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The grandmother, an admirable woman, says when they say goodbye:

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-I will pray for you, Alioixa. I'll pray for you, and you write...

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-For you, babuishka... I will write... For you... (page 313).

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Mozgovoy, to whom we express our deepest gratitude, has made available to us a work of essential content and great literary perfection.