Alexei Varlamov is a prose writer, philologist, author of the novels “My Soul Pavel” and “The Mental Wolf,” as well as biographies of Russian writers of the 20th century. Winner of the “Big Book” and “Student Booker” awards and the Alexander Solzhenitsyn literary prize. The hero of Alexei Varlamov’s new novel “Odsun” comes to the Czech Republic in the late 2010s to give lectures on literature, but instead of the university he ends up in an old house in the Sudetes, with no time belonged to a family of Sudeten Germans. The secret of this house and the tragic fate of its inhabitants after the Second World War evoke in the hero a sharp reflection-memory, where both personal drama and what is commonly called big history come together.