There is a wonderful sense of liberation in the title of this short novel: a sense of being able to gaze at a distant blue horizon and sniff salty sea air. It provides an exhilarating contrast with the atmosphere of claustrophobia suggested in Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky’s work of similar length and loosely comparable themes. But whereas the Underground Man rarely ventures into the street and never strays far from St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, the nameless protagonist of lgor Gelbach’s tale moves constantly between Leningrad, Moscow and Sukhumi. Sukhumi is a Georgian resort town on the Black Sea, where Rubin, a theatre director and friend of the dilettante narrator, owns a little-used apartment. Rubin prods our narrator to stay in it and enjoy the sun, the palm trees, the esplanade and the coffee, but also to write a novel about a certain theoretical physicist called Paul Ehrenfest. Ehrenfest was one of the circle surrounding Albert Einstein in the early years of the twentieth century when Einstein spent five years in St Petersburg. The narrator is not averse to the project, but even when he occupies the Sukhumi apartment, the muse remains elusive.

At last year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Notes from the Esplanade was one of the works I introduced in a session called Absolutely Fabulous, or Writing the Fable’. The title and subtitle gave me pause, because the fabulous and the fable seemed to suggest diametrically opposite meanings, as in Sigmund Freud’s essay on the canny/ uncanny. A fable is, after all, a short tale or poem in which everyday beasts, such as hares and tortoises, engage in contests or trials whose outcome points to some universal human truth. A fabulous beast, on the other hand, is more likely to be a half-eagle, half-lion such as the gryphon, or perhaps a Cerberus, a three-headed dog.