Born in a small provincial town to a working-class family — an alcoholic father and a seductive yet

simple-minded mother — Arkady Khripunov faces a bleak future: a beaten track of dull schooling, followed by dreary work at the town’s only factory during the day and joyless hours of drinking and meaningless fighting with fellow workers in the evening. This inevitable routine is shattered when twelve-year-old Arkady … dies. After recovering from a severe and nearly fatal meningitis attack, Arkady learns two facts: this world is ugly, and he is the one to correct it.

By the age of 35, Khripunov becomes an exceptionally gifted plastic surgeon, obsessed with a single mission: to create absolute beauty. An endless fl ow of flesh and bone before him — bearers of which dream only of becoming material for Khripunov’s practice — drives the genius surgeon to the verge of despair, until he meets his Galatea. Unaware of Arkady’s true motives, the girl eagerly agrees to become the subject of his experiment.

Hassan ibn-al Sabbāh is an all-powerful missionary in late 11th-century Persia. Founder of his own Islam-based religious doctrine, Hassan devotes his life to converting people to his faith. After successfully seizing the invincible fortress Alamut in the mountains of northern Iran, Hassan is regarded as nothing less than God’s chosen one. The ruler of Alamut directs a ruthless campaign against local lords of other doctrines and foreign political leaders. The mountain fortress serves for years as an ideal hideout and training base for Hassan’s warrior pupils, carefully selected to carry out his life’s mission. Trained through harsh discipline, terror, and ardent religious study, Hassan’s soldiers become an invincible force, willing to stop at nothing to spread their leader’s doctrine. They come to be called assassins or fedayins — “the martyrs” or “the men who accept death.” Hassan himself is unafraid of death — nothing terrifies him, until one day he sees a young woman, his own daughter, whom he had ordered killed at birth.

These two alternating life chronicles converge into an original gospel. An immaculate stylist, Stepnova is ruthless to the world she portrays, sparing neither protagonists nor readers. The text mesmerizes irrevocably, with the irresistible beauty of Stepnova’s prose, her absolute command of narrative pitch, penetrating atmosphere, and razor-sharp word choice. The Surgeon — a profound meditation on obsession, death, madness, and beauty — is an exceptional debut, a true manifesto heralding the arrival of a great literary master.