ABSTRACT
According to D. Barton Johnson (1987: 207), Sasha Sokolov's novel A School for Fools was completed in 1973, when the author "obtained a sinecure as a game warden in a primitive hunting preserve set aside for the Soviet elite" (ibid., 207). This experimental fiction, narrated from the point of a mentally ill boy, presented a very negative vision of contemporary Russia and therefore had no chance of being published in the Soviet Union. This novel appeared for the first time in Russian only in 1976, when it was brought out by Ardis Publishers in Michigan after Sokolov's emigration in 1974. In Russia, A School for Fools was published only after perestroika, in 1989 (in the journal Oktiabr).
