There is something Chekhovian about [Yuzefovich's novella, 'The Storm'].... Horsemen of the Sands is anything but a straightforward recounting of this larger-than-life figure’s grotesquely fantastical military exploits. Rather, it is concerned with the act of storytelling — with the questions of why and how we tell the stories we tell ... The Storm and Horsemen of the Sands are not fast-paced reads, but they move purposefully. The former asks readers to go beneath the surface, while the latter opens up an unfamiliar world and invites us to think about the stories we tell.
History and human drama collide in Leonid Yuzefovich’s Horsemen of the Sands, a wonderful tangle of relationships, religions, and realism ... The prose adroitly bears both an ethereal and a concrete quality ... Using two vastly different settings, Horsemen of the Sands combines narratives rife with loss and disillusionment.
This is a rip-roaring story ... There’s a bit of The Man Who Would Be King in here; also a bit of El Cid, at least the Charlton Heston version ... Leonid Yuzefovich seems to have drunk at the same spring that nourished two centuries of great Russian writers ... He has been well-served by his translator Marian Schwartz, who delivers these very Russian stories in pitch-perfect English.
This impressive volume from Yuzefovich consists of two novellas ... Shot through with a mythic and cipherlike style, Yuzefovich’s novellas are cogent depictions of faith, obsession, power, and the ties that bind.
