The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street: a Russian adventure

‘History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.’

One day in 1988, an enigmatic priest knocks on Pieter Waterdrinker’s door with an unusual request- will he smuggle seven-thousand bibles into the Soviet Union. Pieter agrees, and soon finds himself living in the midst of one of the biggest social and cultural revolutions of our time, working as a tour operator … with a sideline in contraband.

Thirty years later, from his apartment on Tchaikovsky Street in Saint Petersburg, where he lives with his Russian wife and three cats, Pieter reflects on his personal history in the Soviet Union, as well as the century of revolutions that took place in and around his street. A master storyteller, he blends history with memoir to create an ode to the divided soul of Russia and an unputdownable account of his own struggles with life, literature, and love.

‘Words by Waterdrinker are as amazing as a superior circus’ Elsevier

‘How evocatively Waterdrinker can write! A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, he makes this violent period of history shine once again.’ Zin

Praise for The Death of Mila Burger- ‘In many respects The Death of Mila Burger is a novel about twenty-first-century Russia, dished up according to the laws of the nineteenth-century novel. Fluent, expressive, amusing.’ NRC Handelsblad