Description

“The soda vending machine stood on Svobody Square, at the exit to Nemiga, where it was moved from Lenin Avenue from the store under the clock, the sixth grocery store that began selling frothy water with and without syrup to Minskers.”

The book “Soda water vending machine with syrup and without” by Uladzimir Niaklajeŭ is a social novel that tells the story of History writ large through the micro-histories of Minsk’s bohemians. This History has many faces standing together in line for a soda: Lee Harvey Oswald and Kim Khadeev, dissidents and gebs, survivors of World War II and soldiers of the first line of the Cold War, the one who condemned and the one who was condemned, and of course the great one, Soviet and concrete. The city in the novel disintegrates, reassembles and shuffles with toponyms. Minsk, to which history from the center of the red empire reaches belatedly, allows the youthful love and poetry of its participants to shine.

“This is a novel about the maturation of a man (and a generation), about the formation of his (and the generation’s) ideals. It is also a novel about the mysteries of youth, the unraveling of which we find 50 years later,” it reads further.