Registration (Registratsiia) is the first landmark novel about the current war. There are no bombs or explosions here; the events unfold in the rear, where a “special operation” of its own is under way, a moral one. Dmitry Glukhovsky’s characters are wartime types who seem to have stepped straight out of the news feeds. An intellectual trying not to get his hands dirty. A peacemaker for whom calm in the family matters more than the truth. A contract soldier back from the war. Gilded youth who went through Upper Lars. A modern-day Kabanikha who wants “everything the way it should be.” And that very “ordinary person” whom journalists, columnists, and propagandists are all searching for: Ulyana, a girl from Vologda. The little person of the twenty-first century, under a microscope.

Glukhovsky has gathered his characters into a gripping plot, gotten inside the skin of each, and confronted them with choice and fear. The soul’s descent into filth under the pressure of evil is traced millimeter by millimeter. Propaganda presses the slave into a person drop by drop. In each of them we will find, alas, a piece of ourselves, but there are no good, clean people here. What we have is a thoroughly Gogolian mirror, which, as everyone knows, it’s no use blaming.