The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

The Year of Terror 1937. Zybin an exiled intellectual and archaeologist in the far province of Alma-Ata finds himself wrongly accused of a crime during the darkest days of Stalin's reign. Soon he and his colleagues are caught up in an ambitious Cheka investigator's attempts to set up a show trial to rival those taking place in Moscow. Vivid courageous and defiant The Faculty of Useless Knowledge is the crowning achievement by the author of The Keeper of Antiquities and The Dark Lady and draws heavily on autobiographical experience. First published in Russian in 1978 it is a masterpiece of anti-totalitarian literature and stands alongside the works of Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov in illuminating the chaos absurdity and bureaucratic labyrinths of Soviet Russia.