★ How “crazy” does one have to be in order to preserve one’s spiritual integrity in a fractured world?
★ By Dina Rubina, a renowned contemporary Russian-Jewish author and a living classic of modern literature—her works have sold over 8,000,000 copies!
★ “The Madman Gurevich” is a literary masterpiece that uses “madness” as a prism to reflect historical trauma, cultural rifts, and individual struggles, continuing the modern tradition of the “holy fool” in Russian literature.
★ The protagonist, Gurevich, is often compared to Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” or Gogol’s “The Madman,” but his predicament is even more distinctly modern: his paranoia is both a rebellion against nihilism and a tragic, steadfast defense of cultural memory.
★ The novel continues Rubina’s signature style, blending Jewish cultural heritage, immigrant experiences, artistic exploration, and humanistic allegory. Through the protagonist’s absurd fate, it probes questions of identity, historical trauma, and the meaning of existence.
★ Rich with the depth of life experience yet imbued with profound insights into the human condition, this is a deeply moving book that takes readers on an emotional journey—through smiles, pain, laughter, and tears.
★ Critics regard this novel as the culmination of Rubina’s creative career and it has already attracted widespread attention in Russian literary scholarship and in the field of immigrant literature.

Sanya Gurevich was a student in Leningrad, the son of two doctors. His father was handsome and dashing, often quoting his beloved Pushkin; his mother, meanwhile, was an unquestionable authority figure. The family lived in a shared apartment, spent summers vacationing on the Baltic Sea—enjoying the icy waters and the ritual of queuing to buy designer knitwear—and while mosquitoes bit them cheerfully on the summer balcony, they frequently tagged along with their father to work at a psychiatric clinic...

“Gurevich, you really are a lunatic!” The nickname “lunatic” had followed Sanya Gurevich since childhood—not because he was actually insane, but because he was forever lost in his own fantasy world and constantly got himself into trouble. Sanya was neither a madman nor a fool, even though those around him—including his own mother—often doubted it. He was simply a clumsy soul, a dreamer with a vivid imagination, a visionary whose boundless flights of fancy repeatedly landed him in absurd predicaments. Through a kaleidoscopic array of scenes, the book paints a portrait of a kind yet somewhat eccentric man, whose life is filled with moments that are at once comic, absurd, tragic, bittersweet, and deeply moving.

Later, Sanya Gurevich was compelled to enroll in medical school and chose psychiatry as his life’s calling. Over the years of his medical practice, how many bizarre incidents did he witness? On one occasion, he even rescued a patient from a samovar while wearing cavalry boots. At another time, he attempted to free a poet from a psychiatric hospital. As a person whose “mental state hovered on the brink and whose consciousness bore paranoid traits,” he often found himself caught in situations that were both absurd and paradoxical. Yet his kindness and passion for his patients always evoke in readers a sense of empathy, a faint melancholy, and genuine admiration. As the tides of history shifted, a powerful wave swept over Gurevich, his wife, and their two children, plunging them into the abyss of exile. Like any ordinary person, doctors too are susceptible to mood swings, magnetic storms, and temperature changes. They, too, experience family tragedies, insomnia, or alcohol intoxication. Even if they have an intimate knowledge of the circulatory system or are skilled at performing enemas, they remain driven by a host of emotions and desires, and their perception of the world is as hazy as the mist over the Neva River or as frosty as a blanket of snow.

The novel “The Lunatic Gurevich” is an expansive work that weaves together a series of “scenes” from Dr. Gurevich’s life—from his childhood to the present day—each one brimming with humor, absurdity, poignancy, bitterness, and even a Homeric sense of wit. Thanks to this fluid structure, the book reads with remarkable ease and grace. The plot unfolds swiftly, without succumbing to the heavy constraints of lofty moralizing or imposing abstract “philosophical ideas,” nor does it trap its protagonist in the typical dilemmas of so-called “serious literature.” At the same time, Zinaida Rubina’s novel is rich in the depth of life experience and imbued with profound insights into the human condition. It is a deeply warming book, and as readers journey through its pages, they are likely to experience a wide range of emotions—smiles, pain, laughter, and tears.

[Author] Dina Rubina
A contemporary prose writer and bestselling novelist, Dina Rubina has repeatedly won or been shortlisted for prestigious literary awards, making her one of Russia’s most distinguished writers.
Born in the Soviet Union (in Tashkent), she later emigrated to Israel. Her works are widely read across the global Russian-speaking community—among Russian, Israeli, and diaspora readers in Europe and the United States. She is regarded as one of the leading figures of “Russian-language world literature,” whose writing transcends the confines of a single nation-state, focusing on themes of diaspora, identity, and cultural hybridity. Her works combine the readability of bestsellers—rich in plot and emotional intensity—with profound philosophical reflections and cultural metaphors, successfully bridging the gap between mass-market readers and literary critics. With a keen eye for detail, she portrays the spiritual dislocation of post-Soviet Jewish immigrants, exploring how concepts such as “homeland,” “memory,” and “language” are being redefined in the age of globalization. Her seminal works, “The Russian Canaan” and “The Madman Gurevich,” both revolve around these central themes. Rubina excels at embedding individual destinies within broader historical contexts—such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the history of the Jewish people—while eschewing empty grand narratives in favor of a deep focus on the emotional traumas and survival wisdom of ordinary people. Her works often feature wise and resilient women as protagonists, while also offering penetrating portrayals of intellectuals grappling with moral dilemmas and artistic aspirations amid profound societal upheaval. The psychological depth and social insight in her writing evoke the works of Chekhov and Bulgakov, while her compassionate depiction of “little people” struggling in the crucible of history echoes the tragic compassion found in Dostoevsky.
In her early years, Rubina’s youthful works were published in the magazine Youth. She lived and worked in Moscow before settling in Israel in 1990. After moving to Israel, she served as a literary editor for the “Friday” literary supplement of the Russian-language newspaper Our Country. During this period, her works began to appear in leading Russian literary journals such as New World, Banner, and Friendship of Peoples. In 1978, she joined the Writers’ Union of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic; in 1979, she became a member of the Writers’ Union of the Soviet Union. She has also been a member of International PEN Club and the Association of Russian-Speaking Writers in Israel since 1990. She has received numerous accolades, including the Award of the Ministry of Culture of Uzbekistan, the Arye Dvorkin Prize (Israel), the Israel Writers Association Prize, and the Oleg Tabakov Charitable Foundation Prize.
Since the 1970s, when she began her literary career, Dina Rubina has published more than a dozen full-length novels and nearly thirty collections of short and medium-length stories. Her work “Da Vinci’s Handwriting” won the Ronghu “Portal” Prize for Best Long Science Fiction Novel. In 2007, her novel “On the Sunlit Street” was awarded the Big Book Prize. Her bestselling novel “The Puppet Syndrome” was adapted into a film and won an award at the Second Silk Road International Film Festival. In 2015, her trilogy “The Russian Canary” and in 2020, her trilogy “Napoleon’s Train” were both shortlisted for the Big Book Prize. In addition, her works have been translated into multiple languages and published internationally, earning her the Israel Writers Association Prize (1995) and the French Annual Best Book Award (1996). Several of her works have also been adapted for film and television. To date, her books have sold more than 8,000,000 copies.