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The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease
Exploring sanity and insanity, truth and untruth, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease is Svetislav Basara’s unblinking and unforgettable deconstruction of the Soviet psyche.
Told as an eclectic collection of appropriated testimonies, treatises, missives, and police files, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease follows the progression of the contagion’s patient zero, a Soviet citizen (sometimes) named Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, as he ascends from hellish health to the sacred illness.
Hailed as one of Serbia’s most influential living writers, Svetislav Basara’s scathing, irreverent critiques of authoritarianism have twice won him Serbia’s prestigious NIN Award. In The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease, Basara lives up to this reputation with a book as formally ambitious as it is intellectually sophisticated. His blend of grotesque absurdism and wry humor evokes the paranoid, vexing worlds of Franz Kafka’s novels and the meta-textual assemblages of Paul Auster. Told from a colorful range of perspectives, the novel is a multifaceted, crystalline account of truth, lies, and history, a sprawling case study of humans in an inhuman society.
Told as an eclectic collection of appropriated testimonies, treatises, missives, and police files, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease follows the progression of the contagion’s patient zero, a Soviet citizen (sometimes) named Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, as he ascends from hellish health to the sacred illness.
Hailed as one of Serbia’s most influential living writers, Svetislav Basara’s scathing, irreverent critiques of authoritarianism have twice won him Serbia’s prestigious NIN Award. In The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease, Basara lives up to this reputation with a book as formally ambitious as it is intellectually sophisticated. His blend of grotesque absurdism and wry humor evokes the paranoid, vexing worlds of Franz Kafka’s novels and the meta-textual assemblages of Paul Auster. Told from a colorful range of perspectives, the novel is a multifaceted, crystalline account of truth, lies, and history, a sprawling case study of humans in an inhuman society.
200 pages, Paperback
Published March 17, 2026
41 people want to read
About the author
Svetislav Basara
66 books144 followersSvetislav Basara (Serbian cyrillic: Светислав Басара) is a Serbian writer and columnist.
He is the author of more than forty literary works, including novels, story collections, and essays. For his novel Fuss about Cyclists (Fama o biciklistima) David Albahari said: "After the appearance of The Fuss about Cyclists, one can safely say, the Serbian prose has never been the same, just like Basara has never been the same author, just like I have never been the same reader again."
Basara received the NIN Prize, a prestigious Serbian literary award for the best novel, twice. In 2006 for 'Uspon i pad Parkinsonove bolesti' (The Rise and the Fall of Parkinson's Disease). and in 2020 for the novel Kontraendorfin (Counter-endorphin).
He was the ambassador of FR Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) in Cyprus from 2001 to 2005.
He is the author of more than forty literary works, including novels, story collections, and essays. For his novel Fuss about Cyclists (Fama o biciklistima) David Albahari said: "After the appearance of The Fuss about Cyclists, one can safely say, the Serbian prose has never been the same, just like Basara has never been the same author, just like I have never been the same reader again."
Basara received the NIN Prize, a prestigious Serbian literary award for the best novel, twice. In 2006 for 'Uspon i pad Parkinsonove bolesti' (The Rise and the Fall of Parkinson's Disease). and in 2020 for the novel Kontraendorfin (Counter-endorphin).
He was the ambassador of FR Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) in Cyprus from 2001 to 2005.
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March 20, 2026
In this wry, knowing jab to the ribs, about the most consequential events in modern Russian history, Basara sets a blazing path through the steppes to Moscow’s front door, from the edge of the the Volga to Lenin’s tomb and right to Dostoyevsky’s heart.
To get out ahead of the elephant in the room, the book’s Parkinson’s disease, or parkinsonism, bears no resemblance to the Parkinson's disease we know, the disorder of the nervous system, but is described both as something closer to mass, simultaneous Alzheimer's, or more simply the disease of being alive. In the book’s faux-foreword, parkinsonism is traced back to the pages of the Old Testament and Job, who endured everything God could throw at him, including, now, having his disease named after someone else entirely.
The “novel which is sometimes a history, a history which is sometimes a novel” is cobbled together from a purported cache of documents: reports, biographies, articles, pamphlets, academic papers, etc, to tell the story of Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, an anti-revolutionary philosopher-warrior-chameleon. A pro-Tsarist Russian, he’s a bit older than Lenin, one of many enemies (who may not be aware of his existence). Parkinson’s various failures may have in fact sped up -- if not precipitated -- the October Revolution.
Parkinson’s history is so hard to pin down because he is an inveterate persona changer, to keep one step ahead of his pursuers. Much (potentially all) of the writing in the book is done by Parkinson himself, under several different names, including a contemporary biography of the German philosopher Jakob Böhme (who died in 1624), and the incredibly dry Tractatus Antiheliocentricus, a long-winded academic paper railing against the Copernican model of the solar system.
Obviously I'm not Russian, and I don't have a foot in that world. I did grow up right next to Brighton Beach, but that's incidental, irrelevant. I don't really know what's in the Russian (or the Soviet) soul. However, Basara doesn't hide behind this. It's not a limited book for a small audience -- anyone can read it with a passing knowledge of the turn of the previous century. At least of the big things that happened (the October Revolution, World War One, etc). I usually shy away from alternate history because it does seem slightly pointless to bother with, but sometimes one just hits in exactly the right ways. I'm not even sure alternate history is the correct term for this book. It's not saying, “what if things went this way instead?” as much as it's asking, “what if there was this guy?” Part satire, part critique, Basara’s lampoon is broad enough for those of us without degrees in 19th- or 20th-century Russian history to spot it, though there is surely nuance that falls by the wayside in names, geography and the like. It is a stunning work of alternate history.
To get out ahead of the elephant in the room, the book’s Parkinson’s disease, or parkinsonism, bears no resemblance to the Parkinson's disease we know, the disorder of the nervous system, but is described both as something closer to mass, simultaneous Alzheimer's, or more simply the disease of being alive. In the book’s faux-foreword, parkinsonism is traced back to the pages of the Old Testament and Job, who endured everything God could throw at him, including, now, having his disease named after someone else entirely.
The “novel which is sometimes a history, a history which is sometimes a novel” is cobbled together from a purported cache of documents: reports, biographies, articles, pamphlets, academic papers, etc, to tell the story of Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, an anti-revolutionary philosopher-warrior-chameleon. A pro-Tsarist Russian, he’s a bit older than Lenin, one of many enemies (who may not be aware of his existence). Parkinson’s various failures may have in fact sped up -- if not precipitated -- the October Revolution.
Parkinson’s history is so hard to pin down because he is an inveterate persona changer, to keep one step ahead of his pursuers. Much (potentially all) of the writing in the book is done by Parkinson himself, under several different names, including a contemporary biography of the German philosopher Jakob Böhme (who died in 1624), and the incredibly dry Tractatus Antiheliocentricus, a long-winded academic paper railing against the Copernican model of the solar system.
Obviously I'm not Russian, and I don't have a foot in that world. I did grow up right next to Brighton Beach, but that's incidental, irrelevant. I don't really know what's in the Russian (or the Soviet) soul. However, Basara doesn't hide behind this. It's not a limited book for a small audience -- anyone can read it with a passing knowledge of the turn of the previous century. At least of the big things that happened (the October Revolution, World War One, etc). I usually shy away from alternate history because it does seem slightly pointless to bother with, but sometimes one just hits in exactly the right ways. I'm not even sure alternate history is the correct term for this book. It's not saying, “what if things went this way instead?” as much as it's asking, “what if there was this guy?” Part satire, part critique, Basara’s lampoon is broad enough for those of us without degrees in 19th- or 20th-century Russian history to spot it, though there is surely nuance that falls by the wayside in names, geography and the like. It is a stunning work of alternate history.
Displaying 1 of 1 review