Vladimir Brik

Vladimir Brik is the main character and narrator of the novel “The Lazarus Project” by Aleksandar Hemon. Brik appears to be in either his late thirties or early forties, and is a native of Bosnia who moved to Chicago during the Bosnian War in the early 1990s. There, Brik married a local girl named Mary, and has committed to a life of writing based on the financial stability provided by his wife’s work as a neurosurgeon.

In the present, Brik has stumbled across the story of Lazarus Averbuch, and believes it needs to be treated in a book that relates the immigrant experience of the early Twentieth Century as a whole. Brik sees much of himself in Lazarus, and many similarities in his own immigrant experience.

Together with his old friend Rora, Brik sets out for Eastern Europe to learn more about Lazarus’s past as...