Morse and Shayevich’s English rendering of Igor Kholin’s vivid 1966 diary accomplishes what no time travel movie or TV show ever has: it makes us totally feel like we are there. Kholin chronicles his spavined, subsistence-level exploits as a notorious underground Soviet-era poet with a curt and caustic prose that makes Hemingway and Bukowski seem fey in comparison. Moments of brilliance and imagination shine through the welts and bruises, revealing a surprisingly supple thinker and commentator, and a poet whose harsh, stubby lines read like nothing else in print.

Igor Kholin's deadpan descriptions of the bleak banality of life in the outskirts of Moscow—with a resigned flatness often poked by prickly wit—feel current even half a century after he wrote them. Morse and Shayevich get the evergreen freshness of Kholin's sharp tongue, and infuse it with their own contemporary intelligence and humor.

Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich do to Kholin what they did before to Nekrasov: give him and his absurdities and bad mood a wonderful existence in English. This is a wonderful book.

Soaked in vodka, bad sex, misogyny, and self-deprecation, the diaries alone are a fascinating time capsule, supplemented by the excellent side-notes that provide thumbnail biographies of all the characters orbiting the Lianozovo world at that time.