The Yenisei never freezes. It runs black through the Siberian taiga, past a village on a clay bluff where Slava grew up and which, eleven years ago, he left — first for the university in Novosibirsk, then for another life entirely, in Moscow. Now he is back for a few days. His mother pours the strong tea. A neighbor has died. Behind a curtain in the antechamber of the family banya hang a pair of forgotten skis — a gift from the man who once came to coach the village boys, in the winter when sixteen-year-old Slava first understood, in the fog of his own mirror, who he was and whom he wanted.
Echo in the Cold Snows is a small, devastating story of first desire and the long road back: a coming-of-age told twice — once by a boy who has no language for what he feels, and once by a grown man who has found that language and lost the place where it might have mattered. Mark Lipkin writes with the hush of Chekhov and the sensuous restraint of Bunin, threading his prose with lines of Alexander Blok the boy once read aloud with his teacher and that the man, returning, still cannot forget. A queer awakening set in a corner of Russia that English-language fiction has scarcely touched; a love story without a beloved present; a confession spoken to a great river that flows on, calm and indifferent, between cold snowbound banks.