Overview

Six Trains of No Return collects twelve short stories and novellas that examine immigrant sagas and dislocations that are both uniquely personal and universal. These are the stories of past lives and loves, memories both fragile and unreliable, and our shared ties to larger historical narratives. They also evoke the Soviet Jewish experience during what was thought to be ""The End of History"" of the waning days of the USSR. A French-Cambodian woman embarks on a series of mysterious trips to the ""killing fields"" of her youth, an encounter in a Nigerian jail forces the narrator to face an impossible moral dilemma, a tender friendship grows between three young soldiers drafted into the Soviet army, a story of a young man's chance romantic encounter with a childhood friend and how it triggers memories of long-forgotten schoolyard cruelties, a pair of soldiers in the waning days of the Soviet Union watching the movie Jaws for the first time at a semi-underground video salon. Emotionally resonant yet edged with quiet humor, these stories explore themes of displacement, belonging, and memory-speaking across cultures and backgrounds.

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Reviews

“From frozen Helsinki to balmy Cambodia, from Soviet army barracks to Hebrew language classes, Matusevich’s short story collection traces the places where lives collide and care takes unexpected forms. Matusevich is a master portraitist and his Six Trains of No Return is a profound meditation on the strangeness of human connection.” —Sasha Vasilyuk, Journalist & the author of Your Presence Is Mandatory “Bracingly funny and quietly devastating, the characters in this indelible collection bring to life a whole teeming post-Soviet world, while reminding us what is most stubbornly human. The stories dance on the heads of history’s rustiest pins, alive to irony, affection, and moral risk: a woman weaponizes her suffering to the point that even death feels like theater; a caretaker whose devotion to an impractical genius becomes the deepest expression of friendship and self; a fearless brawler undone not by prison or punishment but, finally, by American popular culture; a phone call in which an entire imagined life collapses under the weight of factual correction, yet refuses to collapse completely. Masterful in its ability to provoke unanswerable questions about memory, loyalty, victimhood, and belonging, this is irresistible reading, written not to console but to illuminate the deeper truths we live with long after the official story is over.” —Sana Krasikov, The Patriots “The people in Maxim Matusevich’s Six Trains of No Return are poignant in both triumph and failure, whether in need of romance, spiritual comfort, sex, or booze, from the hesitant to those unashamed to reach out and take. These are characters who limp, jump, and soar off the page, from a diffident army recruit to a Walmart shopper, in locales ranging from Russia and Nigeria to Israel and the United States. As a Russian émigré, Matusevich shows us again and again how the personal depends on the political, even in the bedroom. It’s funny and sad and deeply affecting and may be the best book you’ll read all year.” —David Galef, author of Where I Went Wrong “Maxim Matushevitch´s narrator is precise observer; he rarely judges people he meets. His gentle self-deprecated irony is entertaining and at the same time hiding the passages of time people endure. In his short stories are disappointments, loves not to mention pains which we undertake and which makes us sensitive and human. His stories betray knowledge of world literatures, but their sensitivity is uniquely his own. People and places, history great and small, the East and the West all of that through the eyes of sensitive writer whose talent is remarkable. I have not read so good short stories for very long time, I recommend Maxim Matushevitch stories to anyone.” —Tomáš Zmeškal

Author Information

Author Maxim Matusevich, a professor of history at Seton Hall University and a native of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), drew upon his professional expertise and experience as an emigre to the United States in 1991 on the eve of the Soviet Union's dissolution for these stories and novellas. Matusevich's characters come from diverse walks of life, yet they remain unmistakably human-flawed, eccentric, and deeply relatable to anyone who has experienced historical upheaval, immigration, or the slow fading of stability.

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