A School for Fools is a Soviet underground classic of the 1970s, circulating only in samizdat, or self-published literature. A cult novel, it portrays an adolescent boy from Moscow wrestling with the big themes in life: family (dysfunctional, but average), love (unrequited), sex (out of reach), death and the realisation that the adult world around him is corrupt. Yet A School for Fools is not your typical coming-of-age story.
Neither was Aleksandr ‘Sasha’ Sokolov a typical Soviet writer. Born in Ottawa in 1943, Sokolov left for the USSR after his father, who served as military attaché to the Soviet embassy, was deported from Canada following charges of espionage. Sokolov began a journalism course in Moscow in 1966, after which he made several attempts to flee the country, including an adventurous crossing of the Iranian border. In 1975, Sokolov was allowed to leave the USSR, and he settled in the USA the following year where he has since remained.
The novel was first published in Russian in the USA in 1976 and shortly afterwards in English. This underground classic has now been published in a fresh translation by Alexander Boguslawski, accompanied by useful notes.
