Vladimir Makanin, was the great Russian chronicler of post-Soviet society, the new Russia that is seeking to expand and bringing new terror to the world today. With taut psychological depth, wry humor, caricature, and surreal fantasy, Makanin explores the roots of that society, including inside his own head.

The hero of Baize-Covered Table undergoes a searching bureaucratic 'investigation', that staple of the old Soviet and even older Russian police state. With the naked intensity of personal nightmare, the hero anticipates and returns to the starting scene of his inquisition: the bare room, the Table, the ever-present Decanter, and behind the table those recurring phantoms, 'The former Party Man, ' "The Young Wolf, ' 'The Almost Pretty Woman, ' 'The One Who Asks the Questions.'

"It's the Table that gives power to the people behind it," says Makanin. "Take it away and they're just ordinary folk, you and me, your best friends maybe. I've lived with these phantoms from childhood. Any Russian -- it's an old Russian nightmare we're dealing with, not just a Soviet one -- would recognize the situation. Having them rummage in your insides, being helpless, belittled. You needn't have done anything to realize your helplessness, your guilt."

Vladimir Makanin welcomed perestroika, but shows in Baize-Covered Table that Homo Sovieticus never really went away. His writings on the Chechen War expose the pointless cruelty, violence and corruption of Russian soldiers like his anti-hero Asan (a Chechen honorific recalling Alexander the Great). Makanin extends the themes of Gogol and Dostoevsky and finds the downtrodden and the guilty to be the most interesting characters for a writer. His exploration of the post-Soviet culture of denunciation and interrogation recalls Kafka's The Trial.