Encounters with Lise and Other Stories

Leonid Dobychin, once obscure, is now celebrated as a modernist master. His short stories are hailed as a Soviet version of those in James Joyce's Dubliners-subtle and tightly constructed miniatures, linked by recurring themes and motifs, in which meaning is generated by ironic juxtaposition, context, allusion, and nuances of structure and style. This collection includes all of the stories published in Dobychin's lifetime, plus two stories that remained unpublished until the late 1980s.

Leonid Dobychin was born in Dvinsk (today's Daugavpils), Latvia, in 1894. In 1936, shortly after the publication of his novel The Town of N, Dobychin was attacked by the Leningrad Writers' Union. He disappeared the next day and was never seen again.

Richard C. Borden is the author of The Art of Writing Badly: Valentin Kataev's Mauvism and the Rebirth of Russian Modernism (NUP 1999 ) and co-translator of Dobychin's The Town of N (1998), both published by Northwestern University Press. He lives in the United Kingdom.

Natalia Belova is also co-translator of Dobychin's The Town of N.