Ainsley Morse is a teacher, translator, and scholar of Slavic languages and literatures, primarily Russian. She currently teaches at Pomona College.

• Introduction: A Soviet PastoralA Note on NamesPART IChapter OneChapter ThreeChapter FiveChapter SixPART IIChapter SevenChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter ThirteenChapter EighteenPART IIIChapter TwentyChapter Twenty-twoChapter Twenty-fiveChapter Twenty-eightChapter Twenty-nineChapter ThirtyChapter FortyNotesEgunov Bibliography

“The best way to think of [Beyond Tula] is as a kind of layer cake, abook that tries to be an Ancient Greek romance, a Soviet-era production novel,a summer idyll, a parody of various 19th-century Russian tropes and ideas, asour analysis of human nature, and a homoerotic buddy story, all at the sametime. It skips from satire to parody to music-hall comedy (the charactersare constantly singing snatches of popular romances) in a way that is dizzyingto read and must have been a riot to translate. (Ainsley Morse’s translation isimpeccable: enjoyable, coherent, inventive, and at times very funny.) … BeyondTula is a fine addition to the subgenre of Lucianian satires about nothingmuch, about mooching and musing, alongside Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalistor Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet. We are lucky to have it in aforthright and laugh-out-loud funny English translation that pops and bubbles.”—James Womack, Los Angeles Review of Books