Mitya’s life takes a turn toward the hellish when his cousin, Vovka, moves into the family’s already full apartment. From an early age, Mitya likes to dress up as a girl in his family’s apartment on the Old Arbat, but he must do so in secret from his father, a veteran of the Afghan war who values traditional masculinity above all else. Mitya is an immediately sympathetic character, sensitive and curious about the world around him, but sheltered and destined to be disappointed by the corruption of the adult world. Like Mitya, this character faces a series of obstacles on the way to a fairy tale happy ending. Interspersed with Mitya’s story, Kazbek includes sections of an alternate fairy tale involving Koschei. He comes to identify with Koschei the Deathless, a typically villainous figure from Russian fairy tales whose soul is believed to be hidden in a needle nested inside a series of objects like a matryoshka doll, granting him immortality. As a toddler, Mitya swallowed his grandmother’s sewing needle without consequence, an event that led his family to conclude that he is doomed to an early, sudden death, but that Mitya himself takes as a sign of strength and resilience. In Katya Kazbek’s debut novel Little Foxes Took Up Matches, eleven year-old Mitya strives to find his place in 1990s Moscow.
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