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Alexei Ivanov:Пищеблок The Food Block)

It is the summer of 1980 and the Olympic Games are to be held in the Soviet Union. However we are at a remote pioneer camp on the Volga river, normally only accessible from the river where foreigners are not allowed and the camp has only two TVs. Igor Korzukhin is arriving to be a team leader. He was meant to go on an expedition but caught a cold, was pulled out of the expedition and then sent to the pioneer camp. He is not looking forward to it.

However before we get into the mundane operation of the camp we are given two warnings. Firstly we learn that the first part is called The Vampire’s Trail. Secondly we get a tale of the two statues at the front of the camp – a drummer boy and a girl with a bugle. The tale is told by Igor. One night a group of the pioneers destroy the statue of the boy. Workers clear the rubble but no-one notices the tears of the bugle girl. She is devastated at the loss of her lover so every night she gets down from her plinth and if she sees any boy wandering around she strangles him. One of the boys wants to see if there is any truth in the story and sneaks out at night. He notices a girl he has never seen before making her way towards him.

Soon after Igor arrives a new group of pioneers also arrives, including our second key protagonist. He is Valerka. The group members are around twelve years old.He wears glasses which puts him at a disadvantage and is keen on horror stories.

There are two other key characters Irina Mikhailovna is partially in charge and is very keen on everybody following the rules and being good Soviet citizens. Igor with his modish moustache and Paul McCartney badge is not her favourite. There is also another senior woman – Natalya Borisovna Svistunova whom everyone calls Whistler. These two women clearly represent the status quo, the Soviet system, in contrast to Igor and Valerka who are not against groups, though they are independendent-minded, but will only willingly belong to a group that shares their aims.

Life goes on in the camp. Igor organises a football team and yearns for a girl such as Veronika whom he sees topless bathing. The boys squabble and argue while Lvova tries to organise the other boys into a viable football team but most do not want to be organised. Valerka tries to fit in but his attempts in the singing class and art class are dismal failures and Whistler brands him anti-social.

But strange things are happening with Lvova. One night Valerka sees him hunched over another boy. Valerka soon realises that Lvova seems to be sucking blood out of the elbow of the boy. To keep out of mosquitoes Valerka has constructed a sort of tent over his bed. Lvova appears and asks Valerka to let him in. Though not mentioned here till much later, the tradition is that vampires can only enter a house when invited to do so. Valerka refuses. Valerka will later see Lvova sucking the blood of a girl on a bench outside. Both victims seem unaware of what has happened. When Valerka mentions it to Igor, Igor rejects his claims.

However things are getting worse. It seems that there are more vampires and more vampire victims. It seems that unlike in the tradition of Dracula and similar vampire stories the victims do not become vampires themselves but do seem to be beholden to their vampire, doing what the vampires tell them to do, while the vampires themselves seem to be partially recognisable by the fact that they follow the rules and behave as good Soviet citizens.

By this time Igor has accepted the idea of vampires and Valerka finds a staff member who knows about them as well.

Igor and Valerka continue to come across vampires, including one or two unexpected ones and inevitably clash with them.We learn their history, how they function, how they spread and how they die – not always as we might have learned from vampire films we may have seen. It is all going to come down to the traditional event – the Last Bonfire. Igor and Valerka have a pan but plans can go wrong.

It becomes clear that Ivanov is using the vampires as symbols of good Soviet citizens as opposed to those that think for themselves such as Igor and Valerka. The vampires follow the rules, dress as good Soviet pioneers (though it would seem there is a correlation between Soviet and vampire symbols – more mockery of the Soviet system from Ivanov) and are also seen to be as nasty as we might expect both vampires and good Soviet citizens to be.

This really is an excellent novel as Ivanov slowly but surely builds up the tension, from the mild warning at the beginning. We get a detailed description of the activities at he camp and see the usual scenes – boys fighting with one another, the keen ones vs the less keen ones,incipient romances, various activities, bullying and so on while gradually learning that all is not as it should be. The vampire threat moves from being just one person to being much more serious, with the authorities pretending that it is not an issue and our intrepid heroes gradually finding that they face a determined and well organised opposition.

Publishing history

First published in 2018 by Elena
First English publication in 2024 by Glagoslav
Translated by: Richard Coombes