Город Эн by Leonid Dobychin

A spare, impressionistic novella that traces a narrator’s fragmentary memories and everyday observations in a small provincial Russian town, moving between childhood scenes, school and family life, and the routines of streets, shops and neighbors; rendered in brief, vignette-like episodes, the narrative captures the precise detail and sensory impressions of mundane existence while conveying an undercurrent of irony and melancholy about time, social stagnation, and the elusiveness of the past.