Published books

In National Mourning, I return to a world where history no longer feels distant, but deeply personal.
This novella is part of my larger series inspired by real memories from Eastern Europe during the final years of the socialist era — a time when entire systems were beginning to crack, yet ordinary people were still trying to understand what the future might demand from them.
Unlike revolutions that arrive with celebration and noise, some historical moments come wrapped in silence, uncertainty, and quiet grief. National Mourning explores precisely this fragile atmosphere: the feeling that an old world is dying before a new one has fully learned how to breathe.…

Author’s Note

Some days don’t begin like any other—and from that moment on, nothing continues the way it used to. Chernobyl. is a story about such a day. But more than that, it is a story about a time, a feeling, and a young man—me—trying to find his place in a world that was quietly falling apart.

In the spring of 1986, I was living in Moscow as a university student. I was full of questions, ambitions, and that strange sense that something was coming. We didn’t know what had happened—just heard whispers. And even those were hushed. Then one day, my roommate brought in a Western magazine with a satellite photo on the cover: the exploded reactor. Until then we had only guessed. From that moment on, we knew.…