Winter Amid the World

“To live in winter means to think in terms of consistency, as pure as the white snow on the boundless plain.” Moscow, today. Pavel has built the life that was forbidden to a boy like him: an architectural studio bearing his name, devoted friends, and Ilya — the husband he has loved for almost seventeen years. Then a letter arrives at his office. An invitation to a reunion at the ski camp in Sosnovy Bor. A name he has not spoken aloud in decades. They called the boy Champion. It was the winter of 1992. The Soviet Union had just ceased to exist; the law that could still send two men to prison for loving each other was not yet repealed. In a pine forest outside Moscow, Pavel — solitary, athletic, secretly terrified — fell in love for the first time, and the country he was growing into began, almost in the same breath, to fall apart. Moving between that lost winter and the present day, Winter Amid the World is the story of a thirty-year journey toward one’s true self: a first love that bruises a man into adulthood, a long love that quietly saves him, and a generation of Russians — what the author calls the “quiet generation” — who learned to build lives of tenderness inside a country that refused to permit them. Mark Lipkin’s luminous debut was published in Russia in February 2022. Within weeks, war began, censorship tightened, and the novel was pulled from shelves. The author translated it into English himself, so that the inaudible voices of private people might be heard beyond the borders that now silence them. For readers of Call Me by Your Name, A Little Life, Maurice, and the great Russian humanist tradition of Pasternak and Tarkovsky.