Rights Catalogue Fall 2015

Transcription

Rights Catalogue Fall 2015
RUSSIAN LITERARY FICTION
QUALITY COMMERCIAL FICTION & NON-FICTION
Banke, Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency
www.bgs-agency.com
19/2 Nauki pr., Fl. 293
195220 St Petersburg
Russia
Föreningsg. 48C
212 14 Malmö
Sweden
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LITERARY FICTION
Mikhail Shishkin
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Pyotr Aleshkovsky
Eugene Vodolazkin
Marina Stepnova
Narine Abgaryan
Eugene Chizhov
Elena Minkina-Taycher
Victor Remizov
Lena Eltang
Vadim Levental
Igor Sakhnovsky
Vladimir Lorchenkov
Mikhail Elizarov
QUALITY COMMERCIAL FICTION
Anastasia Edel
Elena Kolina
Yana Vagner
Anna Starobinets
Maria Galina
Andrei Rubanov
NON-FICTION
Anna Arutunyan
Pavel Basinsky
Lilianna Lungina
Victor Sonkin
SPECIAL PROJECTS
Sveta Dorosheva
WINNER OF BIG BOOK AWARD 2011, BIG BOOK AWARD 2006,
NATIONAL BESTSELLER PRIZE 2005, BOOKER PRIZE 2000
Mikhail Shishkin
Mikhail Shishkin, born January 18, 1961 in Moscow, based in Switzerland since 1995, is one of
the most prominent names in the modern Russian literature. Before becoming a writer he worked
as school teacher and journalist. His writing debut in 1993, Calligraphy Lesson, a short story
translated into French and Finnish, has won him the prize for the Best Debut of the Year. Since
then his work – both fiction and non-fiction – has been translated into over 25 languages and have
received a large number of prestigious national and international awards, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt International Literature Award, e Big Book Award, e National Bestseller Prize,
and many others.
Mikhail Shishkin’s prose fuses the best of the Russian and European literary traditions. e richness and sophistication of the language, the unique rhythm and melody of a phrase, the endless
play with words and the nuanced psychological undercurrent are reminiscent of Nabokov and
Chekhov. e change of narration styles and narrators within a text yield a fragmented, mosaic
structure of composition that focuses on the language itself, recalling James Joyce’s genius.
Selected list of prizes and awards:
2013 Shortlisted for the e Leipzig Book Fair Prize, Germany
2011 e Big Book Award, Russia
2011 Haus der Kulturen der Welt International Literature
Award, Germany
2007 Halpérine-Kaminski Prize for the Best Translation (Laure
Troubeckoy), France
2007 Shortlisted for Giuseppe Berto Prize, Italy
2007 Grinzane Cavour Prize, Italy
Peoples Literature Publishing, Peking: e Best Foreign Book
of the Year of the 21st Century, China
2006 Shortlisted for Bunin Literary Award, Russia
AST, 2010, 412 pp
Prizes:
e Big Book Award 2011
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
International Literature
Award 2011
Shortlisted for the e
Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2013
English, German, French
translations available
Rights sold:
World English Quercus UK
Germany DVA
France Noir sur blanc
Spain Lumen / Random
House Mondadori
Japan Shinchosha
Netherlands Querido
Finland WSOY
Norway Oktober
Sweden Ersatz
Denmark Batzer & Co
Faroe Islands Sprotin
Iceland Bjartur
Serbia Paideia
Croatia Naklada Ljevak
Macedonia Antolog Czech
Republic Vìtrné mlýny
Slovakia Slovart
Poland Noir sur Blanc
Lithuania Vaga
Latvia Jumava
Estonia Varrak
Bulgaria Fakel
Romania Curtea Veche
Hungary Cartaphilus
China Hunan People
Publishing House
Arabic Arab Scientific Pub
Albania Fan Noli
Turkey Jaguar
Israel Kinneret
Portugal Itaka
2006 e Big Book Award, Russia
2006 Shortlisted for Andrei Belyi Literary Award, Russia
2005 e National Bestseller Prize, Russia
2005 e Best Foreign Book of the Year / Le prix du meilleur
livre étranger (essay), France
2002 e Main Literary Prize of Zürich (Werkjahr), Switzerland
2000 e Russian Booker Prize for the Best Russian Novel of
the Year, Russia
2000 e Globus Prize, Russia
2000 Literary Prize of Canton Zürich, Switzerland
1994 Prize for the Best Debut of the Year, Russia
Letterbook
is latest novel by Mikhail Shishkin is deceivingly simple. A man.
A woman. eir love letters. A summer house, the first love.
Vladimir – Vovka-carrot-top and Alexandra – Sashka; he goes to
war, she stays at home, living an ordinary life. Two people writing each other just about everything – their childhood, families,
trifles of life, joys and sorrows – what could be more normal?
Until we get to know things are not what they seem. e deeper readers emerge into the writing the more obvious it becomes
that the time has been disunited, dissected and tossed together as in a children nonsense rhyme.
e time is indeed out of joint and only these letters bind it together restoring the world’s order. She lives in the 60-s, he goes
to the Boxers uprising in China at the turn of the twentieth century. He dies in the very first battle of this half-forgotten war of
his own choosing (“What war? Doesn’t matter. A war has always been. And will always be. And people get injuries and killed.
And death is real”) – but his letters continue to arrive. She gets
married, carries and loses a child – and keeps writing to him as
if these letters exist in a parallel universe, as if time doesn’t matter – and neither does death.
is is a novel about the mysteries of life – and acceptance of
death. Shishkin is loyal to articulating his principle: the written
word is the key, and so is love. “To exist you have to live not in
your own mind that is so unreliable… but in the mind of another
person, and not just any person but the one who cares if you
exist”. Shishkin’s sophisticated language and intricate style
have won him major international literary awards and comparisons to the greatest authors of our time – and Letterbook firmly confirms this well-deserved reputation.
Mikhail Shishkin
Maidenhair
“Maidenhair is a kind of book they give Nobel prize for – among many other prizes. Not surprising
then that Shishkin earned the National Bestseller prize…”.
– this quote from Bookshelf Magazine is just a
small fraction of praise the book has received in
Russia, and rightly so. It is a brilliant novel that
unquestionably belongs with the greatest
works of Russian literature. It’s universal at its
core – and not only because the action takes
place across countries and historical epochs,
virtually destroying boundaries. e whole novel is a metaphor of a resurrection of the soul –
through the word. And through love.
Vagrius 2005, 2007
AST 2010, 2011
479 pp
Rights sold:
US/UK Open Letter Books
Denmark Batzer & Co
Sweden Ersatz
Estonia Varrak
Norway Forlaget Oktober
Greece Metaichmio
Slovenia DSP
Germany DVA
France Fayard
Italy Voland Edizione
Serbia Paideia
Bulgaria Fakel
China People’s Literature
Lithuania Vaga
Poland Noir sur Blanc
Turkey Yapı Kredi Culture
Arts and Publishing
Awards:
Russia: National Big Book
Award 2006, Russia;
National Bestseller Prize
2005, Russia; Nominated
and short-listed for Bunin
Literary Award 2006,
Russia; Nominated and
short-listed for Andrei Belyi
Literary Award 2006,
Russia
France: Halpérine-Kaminski
Prize for the Best
Translation 2007 (Laure
Troubeckoy)
Italy: Shortlist Giuseppe
Berto Prize 2007; Grinzane
Cavour Prize 2007
: e Prize of the People’s
Literature Publishing House,
Peking: e Best Foreign
Book of the Year of the 21st
Century
e story begins in Switzerland – the narrator
works at the local immigration office interpreting interviews with Russian refugees seeking
asylum. ey all tell stories – some came to Zurich from Chechnya, others from orphanages,
some lost their houses in the war, or had parents murdered in front of their eyes, or were
raped in prison with a mop handle, tortured,
persecuted... ey tell these stories for one reason, to stay. One horrid story follows another,
in a chain of endless questions and answers,.
We don’t know what’s true and what’s not any
more but at the end it really doesn’t matter
whether it’s really happened to them or not –
it’s enough to know that the stories are true.
Now they have a chance to re-write their lives,
to get a new beginning, to find their new true
selves. e interpreter becomes the only link
between the two worlds, the gatekeeper to
the better life. eir lives will lead to their
deaths. Unless he redeems them. Once again,
with a word.
Between the interviews the interpreter writes
letters to his son addressing him as Emperor
Navuhodonozaur – letters that will never be
sent, describing his life as a servant of the
“Swiss Paradise Ministry of Defense”. He remembers his past, reviving and reliving the
story of his doomed love, which resonates with
other great love stories of world literature –
Daphnis and Chloe, Tristan and Isolde.
treat to the sea, march though the deserts and
towns, cross over rivers – and meet a group of
Chechenian refugees who come down from the
mountains, having sworn that they’d rather die
than surrender to the Russians. Time becomes
irrelevant, their meeting seems only natural,
and so the Greeks and the Chechenians continue their journey together.
Interviews, letters, memories, love stories,
Greeks, Chechenians are linked in a single chain
of events and human destinies, interwoven,
resonating with one another, outside of time.
Another distinctive voice in this chorus of voices is a fictional diary of Bella, or Isabella Yurjeva, a Russian romance singer, notorious beauty
and socialite that the main character uses to
write her biography – or to bring her back to life
as he interprets his task. It’s nothing more than
a girl’s private diary where she describes her
childhood, her love affairs, her success, her ups
and downs – but somehow it manages to depict a hole era from the pre-Soviet times till this
day through the events of her 100-year long
life.
In Maidenhair Shishkin demonstrates utter
proficiency in various styles and manners of
speech. e main character’s line of work is by
no means accidental – his interpreting skills are
a metaphor for omniscience – and the real
meaning of a Word – thus his almost obsessive
desire to find the tomb of Saint Cyril, the creator of the Cyrillic alphabet, while in Rome. is
is the alphabet of which his universe is made.
e world is magic only because its story can
be told. It’s unpredictable and erratic, but what
once existed will exist for ever. In the word.
Maidenhair is in many ways an autobiographical novel. Just like his main character, Mikhail
Shishkin worked as an interpreter at an immigration agency.
In the meantime he reads Anabasis by Xenophon about the Persian expedition. And since
the written word has the power to revivify the
past, it is today that the Greek mercenaries re-
Complete English translation available
Mikhail Shishkin
Maidenhair
Norway:
500 pages of pure reading pleasure – NRK
A lavish evidence of the author’s extraordinary creative power. This book is to be
read again and again. – Aftenposten
A caleidoscope of a novel. A literary feast.
One can read this book again and again,
every time finding something new. –
Adresseavisen
Germany:
Shishkin is one of the most gifted writers
on the Russian literary scene, even more
so because, regardless of the fashion, he
has succeeded in developing his own
original style and literary conception –
Ulrich Schmidt ‘Neue Züricher Zeitung’
Russia:
“Maidenhair is a kind of book they give
the Nobel prize for – among many other
prizes. Not surprising then that Shishkin
earned the National Bestseller award…
Actually, many people have written exactly the same thing about Shishkin with the
following inevitable addition: the novel
is majestic, huge and extremely complex.
Joyce, Nabokov, Sasha Sokolov – these
names are repeated in reviews all the
time.” – Vladimir Itkin, “Knizhnaya Vitrina”
“Maidenhair” is a great novel about a
word and a language that becomes soft
and obedient in the hands of a Master. It can create any other reality which
will be more stunning and credible
that the real world. The gap between a
word and a fact, between reality and its
translation to the human language is a
real hotbed of internal tension in the
novel” – Maya Kucherskaya, polit.ru
“A beautiful, powerful and fascinating
book which will become a milestone not
only in the history of Russian literature
but in the development of Russian selfawareness.“ – Bakhyt Kenzheyev, “Nezavisimaya gazeta”
“Mikhail Shishkin won the National Bestseller – 2005 award… One could anathematize the jury’s decision point-blank if
not for the fact that Shishkin is a genius
writer. Unquestionably a future classic
who already has his place in the history of
Russian literature. In case of his triumph
a biased reviewer wants to disregard all
commercial and social considerations
and simply rejoice instead. They made
the wrong decision – God bless them!”. –
Nikoly Sukhanov, “Globalrus.ru”
“Maidenhair” by Mikhail Shishkin is a
true delight of prose. This novel should
not be read but drunk – sometimes in
one gulp, sometimes little by little, in
tiny burning sips”. – Tatiana Yegereva,
„InOut“
ONE OF THE FINEST LIVING RUSSIAN WRITERS,
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow in 1938. Petrushevskaya studied journalism at Moscow State University, and began writing prose in the mid ‘60s. Her first
work was published in 1972, only to be followed by almost ten years of officially enforced silence, when the publication of her plays and prose was forbidden. At that time
Petrushevskaya earned her living by working as a radio and television journalist and
contributing to newspapers and literary Magazines. When her somber and disturbing
absurdist plays were finally staged, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya became widely recognized as one of Russia’s finest dramatists.
A collection of short stories and monologues, Immortal Love, was published in 1988
and met with stunning success among readers and critics alike. In 1992 Petrushevskaya’s novel e Time is Night was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize; it was
translated into more than 30 languages and included in college courses as one of the
most important novels of the 20th century. Since then, Petrushevskaya has published
over 30 books of prose. Today, award-winning plays by Petrushevskaya are produced
around the world, while her prose pieces have been published in more than 30 countries. Ludmila Petrushevskaya is considered to be the only indisputably canonical
writer currently at work in Russia today.
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s recent publications have established her reputation with a
new generation of readers as a master of the mystical thriller and short stories of
magical realism. e New York Times bestseller ere Once Lived a Woman Who
Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (published by Penguin in 2010) won
the World Fantasy Award and was one of New York magazine’s Ten Best Books of the
Year and one of NPR’s Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction.
In 1991, Petrushevskaya was awarded the Pushkin Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Germany. She has also received prizes from the leading literary journals in
Russia. Petrushevskaya’s novels e Time is Night and Number One… were shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize. In 2002, Petrushevskaya received Russia’s most
prestigious prize, e Triumph, for lifetime achievement. Petrushevskaya’s play BIFEM
was awarded the first prize at the New Drama Festival in 2003. In 2003 Ludmilla
Petrushevskaya was awarded the State Prize of Russian Federation. e World Fantasy Award was received in 2010 for the short stories collection published by Penguin
in USA.
“One of the finest living Russian writers… Her signature black humor and
matter-of-fact prose result in an insightful and sympathetic portrait of a family in
crisis”. – Publishers Weekly
“Petrushevskaya is a strikingly original
author”. – The Guardian
“Told in an intimate, loose, over-theback-fence style, this is an alternately
funny and desperate book – a welcome
introduction to a strong talent”. – Kirkus
Review
“Thrillingly strange…Brilliantly disturbing…proves that the literary tradition
that produces Dostoevsky, Gogol, and
Babel is alive and well”. – The Daily Beast
“The writing is beautifully controlled and
the spirit large… She deserves a wide
readership”. – TLS
“A wonderfully talented and significant
writer”. – John Bayley
”The auras of Samuel Beckett and the
baleful Albanian magic realist Ismail Kadare blend in Petrushevskaya’s work”.
Booklist, starred review
“One of Russia’s best living writers… “ – New York Times Review of Books
Translated into more than 30 languages
English translations available
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill
her Neighbors’ Baby
e selection of mystical short stories
A master of the short story genre, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya dazzles the imagination
with explorations of death, love, space, time and identity.
Rights sold:
US Penguin
UK Penguin Classics
Germany Bloomsbury Berlin
France Christian Bourgois
Spain Atalanta
Italy Einaudi Stile Libero
Portugal Relogio d’Agua
Norway Cappelen Damm
Denmark Forlaget
Vandkunsten
Chinese simplified characters
Shanghai 99 Culture
Consulting
Romania Meteor Press
Estonia Tänapäev
Turkey Derin Kitap
Japan Kawade Shobo
Shinsha
Korea Sigongsa
Arabic Yola
Czech Větrné mlýny
Macedonia Ili Ili
Hungary Typotex
Armenia Vogi Nairi
Dutch De Geus
In her magical-realistic stories that at once recall
Kaa, Borges and Gogol, Petrushevskaya pictures the deprived and desperate - orphans,
childless women, lonely elderly people - in search
of love and happiness, in their struggle for life.
e fantastic (magical transformations, resurrection of the dead, living dolls and magical objects) merges here into reality, authentically captured by the author. Petrushevskaya’s signature
prose, harrowing and painfully sensitive, seems
to strip off your skin, making your naked nerves
shudder at the touch of this fictional reality that
is much too close for comfort.
Here is a childless woman who grows a girl in a
cabbage, or a girl attempts suicide and finds herself in a horrid, unlit apartment building chased
by monstrous lorry drivers, escaping a split second before it is too late to come back to life. Set
against a bleak background, Petrushevskaya’s
“fairy-tales for grownups”, as the author defines
the genre, are amazingly dynamic and ingenious.
#34 in NY Times bestsellers list, #15 in Amazon.com in translated fiction
”One of Russia’s best living writers…Every one of the 19 stories in Petrushevskaya’s “There Once
Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby” presents an arresting parable of this kind.
Timeless and troubling, these “scary fairy tales” grapple with accidents of fate and weaknesses of
human nature that exact a heavy penance. Short, highly concentrated, inventive and disturbing,
her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next, a place where vengeance and grace
may be achieved only in dreams”. – New York Times Review of Books
”Simply put, these stories are incredibly weird. But they linger in the mind as unsolvable puzzles:
mysterious and undeniably seductive”. – More magazine
”These stories work the boundary states of consciousness – between sleep and waking, hallucination and realization, life and death – like a tongue works an aching tooth. You never know where
you are or where you’re going, because the ground beneath the narratives is constantly shifting.
You know only that the world you are in is as bleak as Beckett, as astringent as witch hazel, as poetic as your finest private passing moments”. – Elle magazine
There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s
Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories
e selection of realistic short stories
By turns sly and sweet, burlesque and heartbreaking, these realist fables of women
looking for love are the stories that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya – who has been compared to Chekhov, Tolstoy, Beckett, Poe, Angela Carter, and even Stephen King – is
best known for in Russia.
ese “love stories, with a twist” follow the New
York Times bestselling collection of her mystical
short stories ere Once Lived a Woman Who
Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby. e publisher’s
blurb says, “here are attempts at human connection, both depraved and sublime, by people across
the life span: one-night stands in communal apartments, poignantly awkward couplings, office
trysts, schoolgirl crushes, elopements, tentative
2013, Penguin Books
Rights sold:
US, UK Penguin (WE)
Germany Bloomsbury Berlin
Romania Editura Polirom
Brazil Editora Schwarcz/
Companhia das Letras
Spain Marbot Ediciones
Catalan - Edicions del
Periscopi
Arabic Yola
courtships, and rampant infidelity, shot through
with lurid violence, romantic illusion, and surprising tenderness.
With the satirical eye of Cindy Sherman, Petrushevskaya blends macabre spectacle with transformative moments of grace and shows just why
she is Russia’s preeminent contemporary fiction
writer”.
“They are deeply unromantic stories told frankly, with
an elasticity and economy of
language. <…> What is consistent is the dark, fatalistic
humor and bone-deep irony
Petrushevskaya’s characters
employ as protection against
the biting cold of loneliness
and misfortune that seems
their
birthright.<…>They
may not have the heart to
throw the bastards out or lock
the door against them, but
these women hold the keys”. –
New York Times Book Review
“This gem’s exquisite conjugation of doom and disconnect
is so depressingly convincing
that I laughed out loud”. –
Elle magazine
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RUSSIAN BOOKER
Pyotr Aleshkovsky
Pyotr Aleshkovsky (1957) graduated from Moscow State University and worked for several years
as an archeologist preserving the centuries-old monasteries in the North of Russia, before turning
to literature. As a TV- and radio- journalist Pyotr Aleshkovsky runs his shows on modern literature.
Aleshkovsky is the author of a dozen of books of prose. His novels “Skunk: A life” (2011) and “Fish,
a History of One Migration” (2006) were shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and translated
into several European languages, including English, French and German.
Awards:
Fish, a History of One Migration - shortlisted for the Russian Booker
Skunk: A Life - shortlisted for the Russian Booker
Bibilography:
Skunk: A life (2011) - novel
e Other Side of the Moon (2010) - short stories
e Institute of Dreams (2009) - short stories
Fish, a History of One Migration (2006) - novel
Vladimir Chigrintsev (1997)- novel
Arlequin (1995) - novel
The Citadel
is epic tale of a modern-day Don Quixote, who sacrifices his life in the struggle against
greed, dishonor and ignorance, is destined to become a manifesto of the formation of intellectuals amid the dull reality of the new Russia.
e novel is set in the centuries-old town of Derevsk, in
the Novgorod region—the heart of European Russia.
e town’s historical center boasts a range of medieval
constructions, including a 12th century monastery and
a 15th century citadel. e latter has become an unsolved riddle for local scientists, an expensive investment lot for competing property developers, and a never-ending inspiration of local lore. e citizens believe
that there are secret underground pathways connecting the monastery with the citadel, and also serving as a
hideaway for the town’s gold, buried there during the
time of the devastating raids of the Tatars.
e Citadel
592 pp
Moscow, 2015, AST
(Elena Shubina imprint)
Rights sold:
All rights available
Awards:
Book of the Month in the
Moskva Book Store
Ivan Maltsov has been the head of a local archaeological
research unit for 25 years. An honest, forthright, and
highly principled (even recklessly so) man, Maltsov
openly challenges the director of a local museum. As a
result, Maltsov loses his job—his only income, and the
entire source of meaning and passion of his existence.
What’s more, Maltsov’s wife leaves him for Kalyuzhny,
her husband’s former student, and the owner of a competing excavation company. Maltsov has always despised Kalyuzhny for his methods, which betrayed Maltsov’s ideas of the true nature of archeology as a science:
Kalyuzhny’s company would issue unscrupulous reports
and provide services for property developers, ignoring
the real cultural value of historical buildings.
When Maltsov’s wife leaves, she admits to him that, after many years of trying to conceive, she is pregnant.
Betrayed and heartbroken, Maltsov escapes to the old
family dacha in a now decaying village. ere he decides
to complete his research on the Golden Horde in the
14th century. However, the much-desired idyllic rural
solitude eludes him. Maltsov is unable to avoid tussles
with the local drunkards; he continues to receive disturbing news about the plans of the authorities to reconstruct the Citadel and build a hotel on the spot; and
Maltsov’s wife is said to be openly living with Kalyuzhny
in their flat. As the villagers steadily drink away their
squalid and miserable lives, Maltsov becomes an unwit-
Selected quotes:
The present and the past are interwoven
throughout the narrative, but this intertwining is in no way gratuitous. In The Citadel,
Aleshkovsky reveals himself to be not only
ting witness of, and participant in, local conflicts and
dramas. When the conniving and cruel moonshiner, who
bears a grudge against Maltsov, casually kills his puppy,
Maltsov knows: he has to leave, and the village casts
him out.
e meager, inhospitable life in the decaying village is
completely at odds with Maltsov’s visual dreams: buoyant with color, rich with scents, dense with action. In
these dreams, Maltsov follows the dramatic life of the
protagonist of his research work, who is allegedly a family forebear—the notorious khan Mamai’s emir and army
chief, Tugan-Shona. Maltsov follows Tugan-Shona’s actions at the Battle of Kulikovo against the Russians, the
Mongols’ defeat, and the treacherous assassination of
Mamai by a competing ruler of the Horde. Le without
his suzerain, Tugan-Shona refuses to accept the authority of the new khan and flees to Samarqand, the center
of the Great Emir Timur’s empire, in a dangerous and
deadly trip though the desert. Just like his descendent
Maltsov, Tugan-Shona gets involuntarily drawn into intrigues at the court and has to flee again as an outcast,
loyal to his own principles of honor and courage—this
time, to Russia.
ese strange visions open up a clue to Maltsov about a
true nature of the town’s Citadel. He returns to the excavation site with hopes of a true scientific discovery,
prepared to fight for the Citadel’s status as a historical
site against the plans of the state authorities and local
businessmen. What he does not yet know is that this
campaign will become his last.
e astounding beauty of Russian nature; the shock
from his encounter with true life in Russia’s oppressive
and dreary provinces; the epic and breathtaking scenes
of medieval battles; the brusque social satire of moderns morals—e Citadel is a spectacular literary
achievement from an established man of letters, and a
source of precious inspiration in a time marked by the
death of culture and a pervasive negligence and apathy.
a writer and historian, but a true expert. The
same can be said, in fact, about the pages of
the novel that are devoted to the contemporary world. The everyday life and customs of
the regional authorities and the problems of
the Russian countryside are depicted just as
vividly as events during the Tatar-Mongol invasion. – Echo of Moscow
WINNER OF THE BIG BOOK AWARD AND YASNAYA POLYANA PRIZE 2013
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER PRIZE 2013, THE BOOKER
PRIZE 2013, THE BIG BOOK AWARD 2010,
ANDREI BELY PRIZE 2009
Eugene Vodolazkin
Eugene Vodolazkin was born in Kiev in 1964. A scholarly expert in the old Russian literature, since
1990 Vodolazkin has worked in the department of the Old Russian Literature at the Pushkin
House. Prof. Dmitry Likhachev’s pupil, Eugene Vodolazkin has numerous academic published titles and articles to his name and has been awarded fellowships for research and lectureship in
Germany from Toepfer Foundation and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Vodolazkin’s debut
novel, Solovyov and Larionov, became an immediate success, shortlisted to Andrei Bely Prize
(2009) and Big Book Award (2010). Laurus is Eugene Vodolazkin’s second novel.
Eugene Vodolazkin lives with his family in St Petersburg, Russia.
Selected Bibliography
2012 – Laurus, novel
2009 – Soloviev & Larionov, novel
Laurus
Andrei Rublev meets e Name of Rose in this profound tale, a spectacular literary
achievement. An expert in medieval history and lore, Eugene Vodolazkin writes on
the eternal themes of love, loss, self-sacrifice, and faith with the resonating force
and gripping energy of a masterly storyteller. “If you write a fictional story, it must be
a story that can make readers shed tears”, says Eugene Vodolazkin.
AST, Russia
2012, 352 pp
Rights sold:
World English One World
Publications
Germany Doerlemann
France Fayard
Italy Elliot/Lit Edizioni
Sweden Ersatz
Serbia Draslar Partner
Latvia Janis Roze
Estonia Kunst
Lithuania Gimtasis Zodis
Macedonia Antolog
Romania Humanitas
Poland Zysk i s-ka
Albania Fan Noli
Hungary Europa
Finland Into Kustannus
Slovenia Cankarjeva zalozba
Arabic Yola
Awards:
Double winner of the Big
Book Award 2013 - 1st place
and Readers’ Choice Award
(3rd place)
Winner of Yasnaya Polyana
(Leo Tolstoy) Award 2013
Shortlisted for the National
Bestseller Prize 2013
Shortlisted for the Russian
Booker Prize 2013
Nominated for the New
Literature Award 2013
Laurus is a fable in the form of a biography. It
tells of a late 15th century village healer who is
powerless to help his beloved, watching her die
in childbirth, die in sin – unwed and without having received communion. e protagonist, a desperate man, sets out on an exhausting journey in
search of redemption. On this journey of privation and hardship in the service of the people, a
journey that spans ages and countries, the hero
undergoes a painful personal transformation.
lers, Orthodox monks and local governors, and
learn about legendary creatures from the strangest medieval bestiaries. e most colourful characters shaping Ustin’s personality on his ascent
through the hierarchy of Christian martyrdom
follow him on an epic journey to Jerusalem.
ese include a Franciscan monk, a comic character recalling Chauser’s heroes, and a young
scholar with a visionary gi, a clear homage to
Umberto Eco’s Baudolino.
e protagonist sheds his names at every step
of this metamorphosis: in the beginning of the
story he is Arseny, a gied young healer in a
small village. Aer the loss of his beloved, he
takes her name and becomes Ustin, wandering
through the land as a holy fool (called “yurodivy”
in the tradition of the Orthodox Church), and displaying miraculous healing powers during the
great plague. Laurus is the protagonist’s name
when he, by now an old man and revered by the
church and the people, returns to his home village to lead the life of a monastic hermit and
face his most difficult trial yet.
is tale, sprawling across time and place, unites
carefully researched historical fact with the fantasy of a postmodern space. Vodolazkin baffles
his readers with sudden shis in the manner and
pace of the discourse. e reader gets accustomed to the narrative mode of a medieval tale
replete with archaic words and anachronisms,
when characters exchange modern day vulgarities or switch to bureaucratic jargon. e protagonist kicks aside plastic bottles and litter as
he walks through empty streets in villages devastated by the plague. Laurus’s friend and companion, a young scholar from Italy, watches human dramas from the 1960s or 80s in his
colorful dreams. Nevertheless, however meticulously depicted the panorama of the Middle
Ages in Vodolazkin’s novel, the author’s message stands in clear contradistinction to that of
a historical chronicle. For him, time is irrelevant,
while the notion of man’s devotion and self-sacrifice for the sake of love is universal.
e narrative mode recalls medieval fables and
tales. Rich in detail, the story enumerates the
countless wonders and healing miracles displayed by Ustin along his journey. e chronicler
carefully fixes all the minutiae of the habits and
deeds of the medieval doctor and the holy fool,
assembling a gallery of profound portraits. Readers observe Ustin’s patients, his fellow-travel-
Eugene Vodolazkin
Laurus
Selected quotes:
“I have just finished reading Laurus, and
I am totally charmed with it – filled with
an unending sense of happiness that
such a novel exists”. – Zakhar Prilepin,
prize-winning and national bestselling
author of Sin and Sankya
“This is a deeply religious,
luminous,
and life-affirming
novel”.
– Leonid Yuzefovich, prize-winning author of Cranes and Dwarfs
“I am not an aficionado of historical reconstructions,
of historical fictional embellishments; I prefer to
avoid pastiche and archaic elements in
my texts. But Laurus is written with ease
and flair. <…> This is a highly appealing
story, filled with gentle humor, tranquility, and quiet love”. – Vyacheslav
Kuritsyn, prize-winning author of The
Siege Novel and The Month of Arcachon,
for Odnako magazine
“[The novel] Laurus insists that time
can be otherwise, can get scrambled
or disappear altogether, and is in fact of
no importance; what is essential, however, is the space that generates certain
human types. <…> Laurus is a novel that
can uncork the soul’s most hermetic vessels”. – Lev Danilkin for Afisha
“Details in this novel often mean
more than the story itself, yet the
angle of vision, the perspective of
the soul is of primary importance.
<…> It is a multilayered
text, but
its construction is not artificial; the
novel is a living organism. There’s a
lot of darkness in the text, yet its characters gleam with light. It has a scary ending, though its meaning is permeated
with simple human truth”. – Rossijskaya
Gazeta
“The novel tells the story about love that
a man can sacrifice his life for”. – ria.ru
“In a sense, Laurus develops the literary
trend [set by Mikhail Shishkin’s Letter
Book]. This is a profound and passionate love tale, where love itself is taken
beyond the limits of the narrative. <…>
There’s a unique mixture of postmodern
play and classical tradition; of dry, academic expertise and warm, intelligent
irony – this makes Laurus a book you
enjoy discussing and pondering, a book
you want to carry around with you,
opening it and re-reading it in chance
places, a you want to present as a gift
and recommend to your friends”. – Itogi
magazine
“The hero of the novel sacrifices himself
for the sake of his beloved, saving a lot
of people along the way; and in just this
way, the love multiplies and expands,
and is delivered to its readers”. – ExLibris
“This is a novel about a Russian
man delivered from the clutches of
time”. – gazeta.ru
“Vodolazkin succeeds in walking a thin
line, achieving a fine balance between
the ancient and archaic, and the ultra-modern; between the ironic and
the tragic”. – TimeOut
“This story of a young healer-turnedmonk is a compelling read, while remaining free of any trace of internal narrative
haste. It demonstrates a rare, expert
knowledge of medieval lore, history, and
religion. The text does not fall victim to
academic dryness, however, but is alive,
with hot blood flowing through its veins.
Finally, it is a religious text that never
succumbs to didacticism”. – Vedomosti
“Laurus is a novel about love in the
deepest sense of the word. At the same
time this is a book about time. Or, rather, a book about the absence of time, of
time overcome through community with
eternity”. – Novaya gazeta
WINNER OF THE BIG BOOK AWARD 2012, SHORTLISTED FOR
THE RUSSIAN BOOKER 2012, THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER 2012
Marina Stepnova
Marina Stepnova was born in 1971 in the small town of Efremov, in the Tula region. Marina was
raised in Moscow, where she now lives. She graduated from e Gorky Literary Institute and did
postgraduate studies at the Institute of World Literature. Stepnova’s translation from Romanian
of the play Nameless Star by Mihail Sebastian has been staged by numerous theaters throughout
Russia. Marina Stepnova is the author of three novels, including a Big Book Award winning and
nationally bestselling novel, e Women of Lazarus and the novel e Surgeon, which won her the
nomination for the National Bestseller Prize and broad critical acclaim. Stepnova works as a
scriptwriter and contributes to a number of national newspapers.
2014 – e Italian Lessons, novel
2011 – e Women of Lazarus, novel
2005 – e Surgeon, novel
The Italian Lessons
Marina Stepnova, the national bestselling author of e Women of Lazarus, brilliantly weaves together a tragic love story and a Bildungsroman, resulting in a
trenchant novel about a mad (and maddening) love, personal freedom, and the
price one must pay for it.
We follow Ivan Ogaryov’s life, from his bleak lovestarved childhood, through the army and a tragic
deadly accident, to his career as a therapist with
a large clientele at a Moscow private clinic. e
status quo had always been repellent to Ogaryov,
yet at 42 years of age he is living a superfi cial,
formulaic, predictable life. He has his work in the
clinic, joyless marriage and sex, Sunday visits to
his wife’s parents, and Saturday shopping in a
supermarket mall.
Novel: drama
AST, Elena Shubina imprint
August 2014
383 pp
Rights sold:
World English World Editions
Netherlands De Geus
Germany btb
France Les Escales Hungary
Europa
Lithuania Tyto Alba
Arabic Yola
Macedonia Antolog
Serbia Agora
Estonia Tänapäev
Latvia Janis Rose
Albania Fan Noli
Slovakia Slovart
Option publishers:
Sweden 2244
Norway Agora
Poland Czarna Owca
Bulgaria Prozoretz
Czech Republic Euromedia
Greece Livanis
One day is all it takes for this life to collapse into
ruins – the day that Ogaryov meets Malya (24), a
girl who is truly exceptional. eir mad love aff air
sweeps Ogaryov out of his dreary existence into
a heady “Master and Margarita” world, where the
only things that matter are verse, food, love
and…Italy. Ogaryov gives up his long-standing
marriage, leaving his deeply loving wife crushed;
he quits his job (a stab in the back of his friend,
the clinic ’s owner). He frequently travels outside
“the systematically alien, joyless“ country, relishing his new-found happiness. He is determined to
protect their life together at any cost – but Malya
chooses diff erently.
Told in a brisk manner, through shiing, masterfully paced sentences, the novel is rich in metaSelected quotes:
Marina Stepnova writes not
simply well, but brilliantly:
with ease, beauty, intellect,
and authority. [She writes]
generously, without constraint. Hers is an ample,
weighted word, or rather a
deposit of words, solid, juicy
as apples, aromatic and definitive. Such a trove of words
is a boon for any writer. Yet
Italian Lessons offers more
– this is a “novel with a key,”
and with a key idea – and the
phor, and in both hidden and explicit quotes and
allusions to Russia’s 20th century poetry and
prose – from Vladimir Nabokov through Boris
Pasternak to George Adamovich. In her third published novel, Marina Stepnova’s by now mature
voice rings withexceptional strength and clarity.
It has struck a chord with a wide readership; the
fi rst printing of 7,000 copies was sold out two
weeks aer its release. It remained firmly in the
top fi ve of the bestseller lists of Moscow’s major
bookstores for an entire month aer publication,
and drew a lively response from the national
critical establishment.
Marina Stepnova in an interview for Vedomosti:
“One always pays for freedom, and in Russia (and
not only in the Soviet era) the price has always
been exceptionally high. On the other hand, freedom is the only thing worth paying this price for.
Ogaryov loses everything he has: his country, his
job, the woman he loves and who loves him, his
social status. But in return he achieves something heretofore unimaginable – at long last he
can live the way he had always dreamed about
but never dared attempt, because he was always
dogged by that very social status, with its family
expectations, responsibilities, debts . . . Ordinary
life – alien and importunate.”
idea is a sad one. The novel
is so bitterly topical that it
burns right through to the
diaphragm. - Vedomosti
Stepnova’s prose rightfully
assumes special place in modern fiction. Her novels are lyrical experiences told in prose.
Sad stories witnessing to simple yet very important things,
such as that every person deserves to love and be loved in
return. The Italian Lessons is
the author’s new novel, and
in it she remains true to herself and her chosen idiom.
Aficionados of The Women
of Lazarus will be happy to
dive into the unconscious of
her new characters, interpret
their dreams, feel their pain.
And, once again, to ascertain
that Marina Stepnova’s work
is an elaboration of the traditions of Russian classical
writers down the centuries. –
prochtenie.ru
Marina Stepnova
The Women of Lazarus
Aer the success of her debut novel e Surgeon (2005), which gained her the nomination for the National Bestseller Prize and enthusiastic critical acclaim, Marina
Stepnova returns with a mesmerizing story of love, loss and human genius.
AST, Astrel, Moscow
September 2011, 444 pp
Rights sold:
UK, US World Editions
Netherlands DeGeus
Germany btb
France Les Escales
Sweden 2244
Norway Agora
Estonia Tänapäev
Hungary Európa Publishers
Lithuania Tyto Alba
Poland Czarna Owca
Latvia Janis Roze
Serbia Agora
Arabic Yola
Bulgaria Prozoretz
Albania Fan Noli
Macedonia Antolog
Armeina Vogi Nairi
Denmark Rod & Co
Greece Livanis
Awards:
Double winner of Big Book
Award 2012 (third prize by
the jury and readers)
Booker Prize 2012
Bestseller 2012
Shortlisted for the Yasnaya
Polyana Literary Award
Book of the Month by
Moscow Book Store
Marusia and Sergei Chaldonov are indeed blessed in their marriage. He – a respectable scientist
with a bright academic career ahead, despite the
revolutionary turmoil in Russia at dawn of the
20th century; she – a beautiful, kind, and intelligent wife. eir complete happiness is marred by
one thing only: the couple is childless. Aer the
first years of disappointment and doubt, Marusia
makes a deal with God, the terms of which she
never reveals to her husband. And in 1918, when
Marusia is 49 years old, a child is bestowed on
the couple. is child is Lazarus Lindt: 18-yearold self-educated maverick, true genius and a
peer of the troubled century.
Lazar, too, loves Marusia, and with a passion that
is different from filial love. e offspring of a poor
Jewish family of which nothing is known besides
their name, the prodigy Lazarus Lindt becomes
Sergei Chaldonov’s brightest pupil, his follower,
and in no time outdoes his champion. An easy
winner in all fields of science, Lazar fails to accomplish what he wants most. Marusia will never
know about the true nature of Lazarus’s feelings – not when he, already an acclaimed physicist and head of a promising line in nuclear physics, follows the Chaldonovs to Ansk during the
evacuation and stays in the provincial town when
Marusia decides against returning to Moscow
aer the war; not when the jouir and bon vivant
refuses to introduce Marusia to any of his numerous lovers; not even when Lazarus takes his
chances and articulates his feelings at Sergei
Chaldonov’s anniversary. Marusia’s open-hearted
and easy response – “I love you too”– leaves no
hope for Lazarus.
Lindt gets love-struck for the second time in his
life years aer Marusia’s quiet and peaceful
death. Galina – all peaches and cream, an exceptionally beautiful 18-year-old assistant at a Department of Chemistry in the Ansk Engineering
Institute of Water Supply – plans her happy and
simple family life with a postgraduate student,
when her future knocks on the door of the Department in the guise of the Institute’s guest lecturer, living classic of the physical sciences and
father of the Soviet atomic bomb, Lazarus Lindt.
Galina responds to Lazarus’ passion with virulent
hatred unto death, with the stubbornness of a
simple and shallow nature. She will never love
anyone else, not even her son, who commits suicide aer a fatal accident befalls his wife, leaving
their 5-year-old daughter Lida an orphan. e
lovely tomboy Lida soon learns to endure pain,
living through the spiteful indifference of her
grandmother Galina, the physical strains of ballet
school, and the despair of unrequited first love.
Lida is yet to discover that sometimes you have
to go to the farthest ends of the earth and even
to die to find your love – and your home.
Marina Stepnova has depicted the country’s
20th century on a broad canvas, permeating it
with rhyming fates, echoes of feelings, and the
tiniest movements of the human soul. e author’s unprecedented literary command enables
the reader to marvel and wonder at new meanings underlying the most basic notions of family,
home, happiness, and love.
Complete English, German & French translations available
Marina Stepnova
The Surgeon
In her first novel, e Surgeon, the national prize-winning author of e Women of
Lazarus, Marina Stepnova, links together the stories of a ruthless medieval religious fanatic and a modern exceptionally gied plastic surgeon to paint a grim picture of the world of the total absence of love.
AST/Astrel, Moscow
2005, 2013
316 pp; 51 125 words
Awards:
Nominated for the National
Bestseller Award 2005
Rights sold:
Serbia Agora
Option publishers:
World English World Editions
Netherlands World Editions
Germany btb
France Les Escales
Sweden 2244
Norway Agora
Estonia Tänapäev
Hungary Európa Publishers
Lithuania Tyto Alba
Poland Czarna Owca
Latvia Janis Roze
Arabic Yola Cultural
Exchange
Bulgaria Prozoretz
Born in a small provincial town in a working
class family, from an alcoholic father and a seductive yet simple-minded mother, Arkady Khripunov has a bleak future ahead: a beaten track
of dull school training, followed by dreary work
at the town’s only local factory during the day
and joyless hours of drinking and meaningless
fighting with fellow workers in the evening. is
inevitable routine gets broken when Arkady, a
teenage boy of 12 years old… dies.
Aer he recovers from the severe and deadly
meningitis attack, Arkady knows two facts: this
world is ugly and he is the one to correct this.
At the age of 35 Khripunov becomes an exceptionally gied plastic surgeon, obsessed with
one mission, to create the absolute beauty. An
endless flow of flesh and bones before him,
bearers of which dream only of becoming a material for Khripunov’s practice, brings the genius surgeon to the verge of despair, when he
meets his Galatea. Unaware of Arkady’s true
motives, the girl eagerly agrees to become a
subject of the surgeon’s experiment.
Hassan ibn-al Sabbāh is an all-powerful missionary in the late 11th century Persia. e
founder of his own Islam-based religious doctrine, Hassan-I Sabbah devotes all of his life to
the mission of converting people into his faith.
Aer the successful seizure of an invincible fortress Alamut in the mountains of the northern
Iran, Hassan is considered as nothing less than
Selected quotes:
“Stepnova has fingers of a surgeon
that know how to make an ideally
pitched phrase. Stepnova has a masterly
command of stylistic means and lexicon
that equates the genius of her character’s
practice of surgical instruments. <…>
Stepnova demonstrates a misanthropic
vision of this world, yet has a most happy
God’s true chosen one. e ruler of Alamut directs a ruthless campaign against local lords of
other doctrines and foreign political leaders.
e fortress on the mountain serves for years
an ideal hideout and training base for warrior
pupils of Hassan’s doctrine, whom he carefully
chooses to perform his life’s mission. Trained
through harsh discipline, terror and ardent religious studies, Hassan’s soldiers are turned into
an invincible mechanism that stops at nothing
to spread the branches of their leader’s doctrine into the world. ese come to be called
assassins or the fedayins, meaning “the martyrs” or “the men who accept death”. Hassan,
too, is unafraid of death – nothing in this world
can terrorize him, until one day he sees a young
woman, his own daughter whom he ordered to
kill right aer her birth.
e two alternate life chronicles mold into an
original gospel. An immaculate stylist, Stepnova is ruthless to the world she pictures, executing mercy to neither protagonists nor readers.
One gets irrevocably mesmerized with the text,
with the irresistible beauty of Stepnova’s prose,
the author’s absolute command of the narrative’s pitch, its penetrating atmosphere and the
author’s razor-sharp choice of words. e Surgeon – a profound narration about obsession,
death, madness and beauty – is an exceptional
debut work, a true manifest of an arrival of a
great literary master.
marriage with the language”. – Lev
Danilkin for Afisha
“A beautiful, bright, remarkable novel
about how tense and uncomfortable can
it become in this loveless world for one
who thinks of oneself as an Ubermensch”.
– weekend.ru
“This novel is a rare work of fiction that
you can read without understanding and
yet without an urge to understand at all
cost”. – snob.ru
“An ultimately cruel, a mercilessly
beautiful prose”. – 4itateli
BESTSELLER: OVER 200 000 COPIES
OF THE AUTHOR’S WORKS SOLD
Narine Abgaryan
Narine Abgaryan was born in 1971 in Berd, Armenia, in the family of a doctor and a school teacher. She graduated from the State University of Linguistic Studies in Erevan, with a diploma of a
teacher of Russian language and literature. Abgaryan is the author of eight books, including her
bestselling and prize-winning (e Manuscript of the Year 2010 and Russian Literature Prize) trilogy about Manyunya, a busy and troublesome 11-year-old in a small Armenian town Berd. Abgaryan’s other book for children, Semyon Andreich, received BABY-NOSE from New Literature
Prize in 2013, as the best children’s book of the decimal. Narine Abgaryan is also the editor of
several books of anthologies of Russian modern prose-writing.
Since 1993 Narine lives in Moscow with her husband and a son.
Bibilography:
Manyunya – AST, 2010
Manyunya writes a fantastic novel – AST, 2010
e Migrant – AST, 2011
Manyunya, Gran’s birthday anniversary and other turmoils – AST 2012
Semyon Andreich. A story in scribbles – Rech, 2012
People Who Are Always With Me – AST 2014
A Chocolate Grandpa – Rech 2014, in co-authorship with Valentin Postnikov
Three Apples Fell From the Sky
Marquez’ all times classic epic One Hundred Years of Solitude meets Georgy Parajanov’s
breakthrough debut feature Everybody’s Gone in this memorable fable about a small decaying Armenian village lost on the Manish Kar mountain top.
Novel
AST, Russia
315 p
e title of the novel – ree Apples Fell From the
Sky – refers to a typical ending of Armenian fairytales: “three apples fell from the sky: an apple for
the one who watched, another for the one who
told the story, and the third one for the one who
listened.” e novel, too, resembles a fable. Its heroes are several families living in a decaying
mountain village. e village’s only connections
with the lowland are an old wire telegraph and a
hardly visible road that even cows thread with difficulty. Part weirdoes, part naggers, the village’s
few remaining inhabitants – a dozen of elderly
people – share one thing in common: they believe
in magic.
Love and pain, vengeance and forgiveness, friendship and feud tensely knot the lives of the villagers together through generations. ere’s Anatolia, the last from the village’s oldest family, having
survived aer a great famine. A rare beauty and a
book lover, Anatolia would suffer from the ravage
attacks of her husband, who fled the village aer
he nearly beat his wife to death. ere’s a blacksmith Vasily, a widower, who had lost his three
sons and the younger brother in the WWII. e
Selected quotes:
“A tender, somewhat slumber murmuring of
the text miraculously draws you into an idiosyncratic space where it feels so warm, good
same younger brother, who had saved the village
from the imminent destruction in the landslide,
thanks to a unique foreseeing gi. ere’s a healer Yasaman, Anatolia’s friend and neighbor, who
treats all villagers with self-prepared herb mixtures. ere’s even a white peacock whose miraculous appearance in the village in the time of
the big famine will only be explained at the novel’s
end.
Readers follow the mundane routine of the old
people’s lives – them making baklava, baking
cakes, gathering crops, doing house chores – and
get familiar with their life stories weaving into a
slow-paced yet fascinating fable of a village that
faces an imminent ending. When one true miracle
changes everything – a 58-year-old Anatolia
knows that she bears a child…
Narine Abgaryan brilliantly captures the local life’s
oddness, its striking beauty and an underlying
melancholy. With a sumptuous visual imagery, a
close eye for the petty local details, Abgaryan pictures the world where a reader wishes to linger
long aer the story ends.
and calm that even sad events (and there happen quite a lot of sad events in Maran) seem
organic, natural and don’t cause an inner resistance.” – Galina Yuzefovich for medusa.io
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BIG BOOK AWARD
Eugene Chizhov
Eugene Chizhov was born in Moscow in 1966. He studied law in the Moscow State University. For
three years worked as a lawyer, specializing in criminal cases. 1994-97 lived in Germany. In 1997
Chizhov returned to Moscowm where he has lived since, working as a journalist, translator, rewriter and editor. His first published work, a novella An Eternal Fiesta, came out in 1997. Eugene
Chizhov is the author of three novels and several novellas. e Translation, his latest novel, was
shortlisted for the Big Book Award and Leo Tolstoy Yasnaya Polyana Award in 2014, winning him
the first prize Venets from the Moscow Writers’ Pen Society.
Awards:
Shortlisted for the Big Book Award
Shortlisted for Yasnaya Polyana Award
Winner of Venets Prize (Moscow Writers’ Pen Club)
Bibilography:
2013 – e Translation, AST, Moscow
2008 – A Hero without a Role, Eksmo, Moscow
2002, 2009 – A Dark Past of a Man of the Future , Olma-Press, Moscow; Eksmo, Moscow
The Translation
Much like Paul Bowles in e Sheltering Sky, Eugene Chizhov has written a shattering tale
of a modern intellectual’s journey into the strangers’ land – an exotic oriental adventure
travelogue with an inevitable tragic ending.
Novel
AST, Russia
2013
512 pp
Rights sold:
Estonia Tänapäev
Albania Fan Noli
Awards:
Shortlisted for the Big Book
Award
Shortlisted for Yasnaya
Polyana Award
Winner of Venets Prize
(Moscow Writers’ Pen Club)
A self-published unknown poet from Moscow,
Oleg Pechigin, travels to Koshtyrbastan – a postSoviet republic in the Middle East, invented by
Eugene Chizhov – by the invitation of his schoolyears friend who has become a high-rank official
and an ardent herald of the will of the country’s
dictator, Gulimov. e old friend believes that a
visit to the country is the key to a proper poetic
translation of the poems of the People’s Leader
for Pechigin who does not speak the local language and has to rely on Russian transcripts of
Gulimov’s work. Pechigin is intrigued by his
friend’s promise to arrange a personal meeting
with Gulimov; he believes understanding or even
identifying with the poet’s personality is key to a
successful translation which proves to be a challenge with Gulimov, a poet in power he simply
can’t figure out.
Welcomed with a lavish Eastern hospitality as the
greatest modern Russian poet, Pechigin at first
remains unmoved by the country’s ornate façade
– its exotic landscapes, oen frightening traditions, or local’s awe for their leader. Gradually,
however, Pechigin’s interest for the figure of the
Father of All Koshtyrs grows into a fascination.
For him, Gulimov is a true embodiment of Arthur
Rimbaud’s idea of a poet as a seer – the president’s poems forming the basis for the country’s
ruling, inspiring laws and grandest national projects.
e magnetism of this new strange (and alien) life
Selected quotes:
“My readers” of The Translation are those who
read it not as an exotic travelogue and not
even as a story about a “cursed poet” becoming a ruler of a country – though both themes
are present in the novel – yet who read it as
a story relating to them, a personal account
of the immersion into an alien world. Of the
immersion and an eventual disappearance” –
Eugene Chizhov
draws the confused translator into a desert-like
delusory reality. In this world a high-rank prostitute recalls of an incident when she sat in the
People’s Leader’s lap at her teen age as a deathdenouncing experience; a member of the local opposition prompts Pechigin to look for a demon’s
traits in his friend; and an old man claiming to be a
real author of Gulimov’s poems acts as a schizophrenic. Obsessed with the search of the inner
Gulimov in himself, Pechigin finally meets the
president – only to see Gulimov gunshot by a
member of the opposition. Next thing Pechigin is
in jail under the accusation of an attempted, and
failed, assassination of the president. Will he be
granted another chance to meet the real Gulimov
in prison and thus complete his translating job?
e epigraph to the novel, a line attributed to the
poet Osip Mandelshtam – “Poetry is power”,
clashing against Gulimov’s statement “Everyone
is a poet”, grows on metaphysical, eerie meanings as the novel spirals to its inevitable tragic
ending.
Eugene Chizhov’s exceptional literary achievement results from an enchanting blend of genres
(an existential novel, an adventure travelogue, a
psychological thriller, with an inclusion of poetic
work) and the novel’s rich ideological texture. A
compelling story in the first place, e Translation
prompts readers to ask uneasy questions and
seek answers, lingering in mind long aer the
novel’s completion.
“I think it was Translation’s pervasive sense of
creepiness that was responsible for keeping
me up late reading: Koshtyrbastan’s isolation,
Gulimov’s ubiquity, Koshtyrs’ admiration for
Gulimov, and, especially, Oleg’s transformations as he searches for his inner Gulimov so
he can complete the translations. Chizhov
blends all this together beautifully” - http://
lizoksbooks.blogspot.ru/2014/09/chizhovstranslation.html Lisa Hayden Espenschade
“Chizhov is a master of a great storytelling, yet
the basis of his novels is the style; his prose is
almost tactile (tangible), dense, comprised
of melancholy irony and mystery”. – Lev Danilkin, Afisha
LONGLISTED FOR THE RUSSIAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014, THE NATIONAL
BESTSELLER 2014, YASNAYA POLYANA LEO TOLSTOY PRIZE 2014
NEW LITERATURE AWARD 2014
Elena Minkina-Taycher
Elena Minkina-Taycher was born in Moscow. Aer graduating from the First Moscow State Medical University she worked as a doctor in the cardiac department of a Moscow hospital.. In 1991
Elena Minkina-Taycher moved to Israel, where she received another degree and began working as
a doctor in her own private clinic. Since 2000 she has had her short stories and novellas published
in magazines and literary journals in Israel, Germany, the US, and Russia. Elena is the author of
four books of prose. e Rebinder Effect is her first novel, nominated in 2014 for several major
literary awards, and long-listed for the Russian Booker Prize and the Yasnaya Poliana (Leo Tolstoy) Prize.
Bibliography:
2014 – e Rebinder Effect – a novel. Moscow, Vremya, 348 pp
2011 – A Woman on a Given eme - novellas and short stories. Moscow, Pokolenie Publishers,
352 pp
2004 – All You Gave Is Me – novellas, short stories, plays. St Petersburg, Retro, 504 pp
2000 – A Hundred Years Will Pass – a novella, short stories, a play. Moscow, 232 pp
The Rebinder Effect
e Rebinder Effect is an absorbing family saga that sweeps you away on a grand
journey through generations, changing epochs and intertwining personal dramas.
In her debut novel, Elena Minkina-Taycher uses a remarkably mature style to move
multiple plot lines forward, keeping readers in suspense till the end of the book.
Novel
Vremya, Moscow
2014
352 pp
Rights sold:
World English Glagoslav
France Grasset
Latvia JLV
Arabic Arab Scientific
Publishers
Estonia Varrak
Albania Fan Noli
Awards:
Longlisted for the Big Book
Award 2014
Longlisted for the e
National Bestseller 2014
Longlisted for the Yasnaya
Poliana (Leo Tolstoy) Prize
2014
Longlisted for the New
Literature Award 2014
e “Rebinder effect” in physics is “the drop in
mechanical strength, deformation and decomposition of solids through the reversible physicochemical action of a particular medium.” e
novel’s characters demonstrate that this rule
easily applies to life – a seemingly minor incident
may destroy a man’s fate. Exploring her characters through mysteries and family secrets, passionate affairs and hurt feelings, through love
and loss, Elena Taycher teaches readers the key
point of this physical law – that the nature of the
effect is that it can and should be reversible.
e novel is told in chapters titled with lines from
Pushkin’s lyrics. Each chapter is devoted to one
character, the private stories eventually forming
a grand picture of Russia in the 20th century –
from tsarist times through the harsh repression
of the 30s, then the severe postwar years
through the poetic 60s, and finally the tumult of
the 90s.
colorful range of characters: a gied young violin
player, a bon vivant, and a self-conscious, fastidious schoolgirl from the 1950s; an intelligent female doctor exiled to the Gulag and a compassionate peasant woman who raises the doctor’s
daughter aer her tragic death; two orphans –
one a promising nuclear physicist, the other a
lower-middle class, first-generation Moscow
resident; an aspiring graduate student who falls
for the alluring young wife of a renowned scholar. Fascinating interlacing stories of love, friendship, loss, and betrayal are woven together into
a tight knot by one tragic family secret from the
distant past.
Told with remarkable ease and clarity, the novel’s complex plot line makes for a gripping, enjoyable, and rewarding read, and heralds the arrival
of a strong new voice in the field of upmarket
women’s literature.
e novel knits together and jostles a clashing,
Selected quotes:
“Technically, writing a polyphonic family saga is not a complex task – hence
the genre’s popularity. Yet writing in
such a way that the story of a fictional
family elicits empathy is a rarer accomplishment; and all the more when the
polyphony of this form captures the
charm and intrigue of live music. The
author’s brilliant mastery of these skills
makes The Rebinder Effect more than
just another story of life in the USSR.
This novel is not about the story of human life or lives, it is rather about the
essential core of life – flowing, multifaceted, demanding that its riddle be
solved, yet remaining forever elusive
and enigmatic for all that. – The Book
Review (Knizhnoe obozrenie)
The rhythm of the storytelling is agile,
pulsing; the author weaves her tale
employing regular forays into the past,
symmetrical plot developments, and
divergent visions of the same event.
The novel is constructed with virtuosity, and all the disparate lines eventually converge into one “assemblage
point” – The Lehaïm
Out of the individual chapters and
stories, Elena Minkina-Taycher stitches
together a patchwork panorama of
Russia’s 20th century, modulating and
shifting accents: from catastrophe, to
the world of old ladies dressed in laces
and shawls; from restless grownups, to
respectful school children, speaking
to each other in lines from Alexander
Pushkin.” - Psychologies
“You enjoy the novel’s dramatic ease
and simplicity, diving into its recollections. The key elements of the novel’s
success are its authenticity, perspicuity, and remarkable grasp of the laws of
life; the book’s task is not to entertain,
but to inspire, and to strengthen the
reader’s faith in simple human happiness” – livelib.ru
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BIG BOOK AWARD 2014
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RUSSIAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014
Victor Remizov
Victor Remizov was born in Saratov in 1958, where he studied geological prospecting in college.
Aer the service in the army Remizov studied languages at Moscow State University. He worked
as a surveyor in the Taiga, a journalist and a school teacher of Russian literature. His stories have
been published in Novy mir literary journal. In 2008 his first collection of short stories was published by Vremya, Moscow. e novel Ashes and Dust was first published in the Khabarovsk
publishing house. It was sold out in the region within the span of a few weeks, and was nominated
by the publisher for the Big Book Award, where it made it onto the list of finalists. At that point the
novel was offered to major publishers in Moscow, and Elena Shubina of AST Publishers, a prominent publisher of modern Russian fiction, bought the rights aer an auction.
Victor lives in Moscow with his family, and is now at work on his next novel, to be set in the Altai
region during the Stalinist era.
Bibliography
2014 – Ashes and Dust, novel
2008 – Short story collection
Ashes and Dust
Victor Remizov’s novel – which immediately recalls Jack London’s prospector stories –
raises uncomfortable questions about what is worth dying for; whether one man’s freedom can mesh with social freedom; and how, and how far, the repercussions of the clash
between written law and man’s free will travel.
e novel takes place in one of the hunting and
fishing settlements of Russia’s Far East, set
against the arrestingly beautiful background of
the autumn Taiga.
Novel
AST, Russia
2014
412 pp
Rights sold:
Germany, dtv
France Belfond
Estonia Kunst
Romania, Polirom
Arab Arab Scientific
Pubishers
Film rights:
Under negotiation
Awards:
Award 2014
Booker Prize 2014
Literature Award (NOS)
A road incident between a local hunter and the
police escalates into an armed conflict, bringing
to light grave issues in the strained relations between the locals and the authorities. Locals make
a living through the sale of caviar, fish, and sable.
e Moscow-determined quotas are not feasible
for them, and for years the police have been providing “protection” for poachers, demanding 20%
of their income in return. e villagers are split
between those who break down and pay the police and those who choose to follow the centuries-old code of the Taiga.
e truck driver who hits the police car is one of
those who refuses to pay, and, afraid of the possible consequences, he flees to his hunting
grounds. e police chief would prefer to settle
the issue quietly, but this interferes with the career plans of the deputy chief, who calls out a special law enforcement unit from Moscow. What is
intended to be merely a law enforcement raid
turns into rash havoc, as the heavies from the city
lay down the law and teach the locals a lesson by
confiscating their catch and executing random arrests. Professionally trained and fully equipped,
they do not expect any confrontation. And at first
they aren’t faced with any – apart from a scolding
by the local female bartender, a fisherman’s wife.
Until they come face to face with a local tramp,
that is, whom they cannot but recognize.
Selected quotes:
First of all, Remizov knows what he is writing
about. He knows his subject – winter hunting,
Taiga fishing, life on the shores of the Okhotsk
Sea. But this is not just a story by an expert.
And this is not just a literary work with colorful,
memorable, and realistic male characters. What
strikes one here is that it is a novel that poses
a traditional Russian question. The traditional
Russian question is not “to be or not to be”;
e colorful and absolutely credible cast of characters includes hunters, fishermen, police officers, and their families. ere’s an old hunter who
is preparing for what is most likely his last hunting
season; but he dies of a heart attack aer the
deputy police chief detains him, in possession of
an unregistered gun. ere’s a 40-year old hunter,
nicknamed the Student, who settled in the village
aer the summer of his second year at university,
and chose the Taiga over his studies. ere is a
well-to-do Muscovite, searching for personal freedom in the Taiga. He manages grapple with a bear
that has been aer him, yet fails when he tries
resist the special forces unit that carries out a random search in his hunting lodge. Another character is the head of the fishermen’s brigade, who
lost his 18-year old son in a knife fight at the local
bar and found late love in a marriage with his
son’s coeval. And there’s a tramp with a diploma
from the Moscow Conservatory and a background in the Chechen war. At one point the men
get together in the fugitive hunter’s hut – only to
discover he is determined to carry out his personal war alone.
Stern men, harsh surroundings and wildlife,
breathtaking landscapes, arresting hunting
scenes, and bitter social conflict make for a novel
that is at the same time both exotic and traditional, yet very manly. e novel received generous praise from the juries of major annual literary
prizes, and became a sensation with local readers
in Siberia.
nor is it “who is guilty and what is to be done.”
The traditional Russian question is “what is
worth killing and/or dying for?” This question
is always settled individually, and often unconsciously. And the question has not been raised
in the fiction of recent decades. Well, here it
comes. – Literaturnaya Gazeta
Victor Remizov is not just a traditional prose
writer, he is a traditional writer par excellence:
intelligent, calculating, comprehensive, slowpaced as a Taiga fisherman. <…> Remizov’s
novel is social and analytical. Victor Remizov
did not show us full-fledged Russian revolt,
but he showed us a very Russian clamor and
outcry. And the coercive justice that always
follows the clamor. This already suffices. – Svobodnaya Pressa
Lena Eltang
Lena Eltang was born in 1964 in Leningrad. A journalist and a translator, she has also become
known as a poet aer the publication of two collections of poems in 2003 and 2004, and as a
short-prose writer, when her works were included in the Five Names anthology. Blackberry
Shoot, Lena’s first novel, created a stir on the Russian literary scene. Cartagena is Eltang’s
fourth novel to date. Lena has lived in Paris and Copenhagen. She now lives in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Awards:
Shortlisted for the Big Book Literary Award 2012
Shortlisted for Russian Literary Prize 2011
Winner of the New Literature Award 2010
Bibliography:
2014 - Cartagena, novel
2011 - e Other Drums, novel
2008 - e Stone Maples, novel
2006 - Blackberry Shoot, novel
Cartagena
From the prize-winning author of Blackberry Shoot and e Stone Maples, comes
a mesmerizing tale of unwanted love, unperformed vengeance and myths coming
alive.
e action unfolds on the rocky coast in the
northern Italy, set in the beautiful Briatico hotel
– a snow-white manor turned a private nursing
pansion.
Cartagena
Novel
Ripol, November 2014
Rights sold:
Albania Fan Noli
Publishers
Latvia Janis Roze
Option publishers:
Lithuania Vaga
Petra, a law student, arrives to Briatico from
Rome as a nurse, set on her own investigation
of the ruthless murder of her brother. e local
police inspector is inclined to assign the murder to the result of a trivial ruffle among young
men from the village, but Petra knows – the
killer is one from the hotel staff. Petra is not the
only one in the Briatico hotel who hides behind
a false identity.
An Englishman playing the piano in the hotel’s
lounge lies not only about his real occupation,
but also about his nationality. A writer, who has
lost his ability to write or sustain a proper relationship, he looks for traces of his lost love. His
girlfriend mysteriously disappeared years ago
in the premises of the manor, leaving a blazing
chapel behind…and a heartbroken Marcus,
who has never recovered from what he sees as
a betrayal of his love.
ere is a hotel guest, who claims to be a captain, trading a false beard and boasting numerous stories of his fake sea adventures. A heir,
deprived of the manor, he wants a pay-off for
what belongs to him by birthright.
Finally, there’s a killer who turns part a comedy
of errors, part a blood-curdling crime drama,
performed against the strikingly beautiful setting of the Briatico hotel, into an antique tragedy.
Torn by passions, haunted by murky secrets of
the past, these different people are drawn to
Briatico by fate’s invisible threads, seeking
vengeance and truth they will want to believe.
Eltang brilliantly weaves an intricate web of
dramatic turns and shocking riddles, tossing
ever-elusive evidence and upturning facts, and
follows her characters through the labyrinth of
the text with an agile curiosity and genuine
sympathy.
Told in Eltang’s trademark poetic diction, with
an immaculate pitch, unexpected plot twists
and a unique delicacy in use of literary allusions,
Cartagena is more than a spectacular literary
achievement and a much-awaited literary sensation of the year. Cartagena is an engrossing
human drama that will make readers shed
tears, run from temptations, solve riddles and
shake with sympathy, dread and love for its
characters.
Lena Eltang
The Other Drums
In e Other Drums, Lena Eltang’s brilliant third novel, the national prize-winning
author completes the theme of escape and freedom in a work that has prompted
comparisons to such classics as De Profundis and Invitation to a Beheading.
Eksmo, 2011
640 pp
Prizes:
Literary Award 2012
Literary Prize 2011
Rights sold:
Estonia Varrak
Option publishers:
Latvia Janis Roze
Lithuania Vaga
e novel begins with the arrest of 34-year old
Kostas Kairis, a Lithuanian citizen, in his house
in Lisbon, Portugal. Kostas is not the original
owner of the house; his step-aunt Zoe inherited
the ancient mansion aer the suicide of her
husband, scion of a noble Portuguese family.
Zoe included Kostas in her will at the last moment, just a few days before her early demise
from cancer at the age of 44, leaving virtually
nothing to her own daughter. e aunt’s will
burdens Kostas with mortgage payments to
the bank, and bans him from re-selling the property. An idle intellectual, Kostas pays the bills
by selling the Braga family furniture and jewelry, and subletting the house to shadowy business operations. First, his childhood friend Ljutas installs cameras into the mansion to shoot
porn movies. e built-in surveillance appliances come in handy for blackmailing Kostas’
chance lover, who offers a share of her husband’s settlement deal if they catch him with
his pants down on a set-up date with a call girl.
Kostas watches in awe as the date unravels
and a stranger shoots the prostitute with the
Braga family gun. e blackmailers turn the evidence of dead body against Kostas, and when
the police come to arrest him several weeks
later on murder charges, Kostas feels relieved – he will not hesitate to reveal the identities of the real murderers.
His experience in jail is a rude awakening for
Kostas: he is held in solitary confinement as a
murderer; the interrogations and meetings
with a lawyer are only occasional; and the
guards oen forget to bring him his meals. Yet
he’s been allowed to use his laptop – a real
treasure for an undereducated historian turned
writer. Kostas begins by writing a letter to his
Estonian wife, from whom he separated over
fieen years before. What begins as an explanatory letter grows during nine weeks of imprisonment into powerful confessional prose permeated with guilt, melancholy, and fear of loss.
As Kostas Kairis speaks of people he once
knew, loved and hated, befriended and betrayed, dreamt of and never came to understand, the reader of Kostas’ “diary” becomes
the spectator of a street puppet show at which
the director, with a wave of his wand or the
sound of the other drums, exchanges roles
with the cast. e tension and passion grows
with every page, until one day Kostas begins
thinking the door to the cell is not real either,
throws it open – and walks out.
In her immaculate poetic diction, and with profound encyclopedic knowledge, Lena Eltang
concocts a unique mosaic of a novel about guilt
and memory that makes us all its voluntary
prisoners.
The Stone Maples
A stunning family drama told with the precision of Nabokov and the hypnotic intensity of Joyce, from the author of Blackberry Shoot (“one of the finest novels written in Russian in years”).
AST, Russia
2008 , 414 pp
100 000 words
Awards:
Winner of e New
Literature Award
Foreign rights:
Latvia Janis Roze
Lithuania Vaga
Red-haired Sasha Saunley runs a Bed and
Breakfast called e Stone Maples in the tiny,
remote village of Wishguard, somewhere on
the moors of Wales. Not only is she considered
weird, she is also rumored to be a witch. Such
a rumor is not absolutely groundless, since she
has refused to speak since the next-door teenagers killed her dogs, Hugin and Munin, all the
more as e Stone Maples long ago became a
substitute for her five-o-clock meetings with
the second cousins of her late father. Sasha’s
younger stepsister Edna disappears under obscure circumstances – while in the courtyard, a
hummock appears with an epitaph for the
“Younger One”.
the locals, envy and betrayal, fantasies, myth,
and legend – all this enchants Llewellyn, and
when he is about to admit his loss of the bet, he
finds another of Sasha’s journals, containing
totally different entries. Why does she need
two journals; and, more important, which of
them is truth and which is fiction?
Told through the journals and letters of Sasha,
her stepmother, and her younger stepsister
Edna Alexandrina, Llewellyn, and Tabitha, the
London girl who is in love with him, this entrancing family drama reveals one shocking
mystery aer another. e most significant
puzzle is broached at the very end.
e possible crime of the Welsh witch becomes the pretext for a bet – and Llewellyn, a
Londoner, arrives at e Stone Maples to investigate what is purported to be a murder.
Sasha’s journal falls into his hands – the passionate, poetic, and witty confession of an enigmatic woman. Her love-hate relationship
with her younger stepsister, knotty affairs with
e Stone Maples is a breathtakingly deep and
atmospheric novel inhabited by lovable and
vivid characters. Masterly use of cultural layers,
the delicacy of literary allusion reminiscent of
Joyce and Nabokov, and an eerily prophetic
gaze at reality – these are the trademarks of
Lena Eltang, one of the most unique authors
writing in Russian today.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BIG BOOK AWARD 2013
LONGLISTED FOR THE RUSSIAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013
Vadim Levental
Vadim Levental was born in 1981 in St Petersburg. Levental studied dramatic performance art in
college, leaving it for language studies at the St Petersburg State University, where he majored in
Russian literature. He travelled extensively, worked as a loader, a waiter, a designer, a bank clerk
and played a small part in a TV series. Today Vadim Levental is a columnist of a national daily
newspaper, the managing director of the National Bestseller Prize, and the editor-in-chief of an
independent press in St Petersburg. His fiction was published in magazines and anthologies, including St Petersburg Noir (Akashic Books, Brooklyn, NY). Masha Regina is his first novel. Vadim
Levental is married and has a son.
Bibliography
2012 – Masha Regina, novel
Masha Regina
Love, death, nature of art, place of an artist in modern society – Levental’s themes
are most universal. Told with a resonating energy, breath-taking emotion and astounding reflection, this coming-of-age story about a gied film director heralds the
arrival of a remarkable literary talent. Masha Regina is a complex work that makes
you recollect Vladimir Nabokov’s Luzhin Defence, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Marriage Plot
and films by Miloš Forman or Lars von Trier.
Lenizdat/A-team, Russia
2013, 352 pp
Rights sold:
UK, US Oneworld
Publications
Latvia Kontinent
Arabic rights Arab Scientific
Publishers
Film rights sold
Awards:
Award 2013
Longlisted for the Russian
Booker Prize 2013
Literature Award (NOS)
is is a fictional biography of a young film director Masha Regina as she struggles along her
way from a teenage school student in a provincial town to a prominent figure of a European
film scene. As Masha searches for new artistic
means to battle with the existential Angst, three
men in her life fight for Masha herself.
ere is a college teacher, a dream of every Masha’s girlfriend in art college, who leaves his wife
for her sake. e irresistible and complacent Roman, a gied cameraman, her partner and father
of her daugter, who will stand no chance against
the passionate irrationality of Masha’s continuous self-destructive experiments. e renowned
German actor, Peter, loves Masha with the anguish of a sacrificial love and Masha deeply reveres him in return. ese are three intense and
arresting love stories that shape the heroine –
quite paradoxically – as a person free from gender-defined role models.
Masha Regina cannot avoid life’s natural flow
and its typical issues: first love, first sex, childbirth, adultery. Nor do these themes escape
from the omnipresent narrator, who excels in
Selected quotes:
“A big, clever, piercing Russian novel.
Levental has an ear of an accomplished
poet, lungs of a hammerer man and a
mind of a young mathematician; I’m not
talking of wit, I mean the sophistication
of a philosopher. We’ve got a true Master
of an early Bitov. You can never say this
is a debut novel of a young 31-year-old
writer. He lives in St Petersburg, this can
explain a lot”. – Afisha
“Masha’s struggle against her fate is a
struggle of an Atlant against his sky. In
this sense this heroine presents a new
type for Russian fiction, and despite it is
new, it is not unvalidated”. – gazeta.ru
pinpointing emotions and reactions of the young
girl on the cusp of adulthood. However the heroine and the narrator use life, its mundane issues
and others’ feelings, as a material for reflection,
channeling it into art form. Along this turbulent
way of self-definition and experiments in exploring limits of artistic potential, the young film director acts with dashing impudence of youth
and talent. As Masha Regina’s career in film
takes dramatic heights, her heart breaks against
the impossible choices that a true artist has to
make.
Part philosophical treatise, part an emotional
and engrossing human drama, Masha Regina is
at once disturbing, intellectually challenging and
unfailingly entertaining. rough complex, onepage long, immaculately pitched sentences,
smart allusions of the widest encyclopaedic
spectrum, Nabokovian lucid precision of word
choice, vivid imagery and characters of exceptional volume and will, Levental pictures an integral, complete and detailed universe of an artistic individuality and recounts the tragic story of
the total lonesomeness.
“A brilliant novel. This is a story about
art and the cost that the protagonist, a
young girl, has to pay to become an internationally recognised film director.
This is a story of success, yet told inside
out, a story of tragedy of the solitude”. –
Galina Yuzefovich, a literary critic
“This new sort of writing resembles a silent window looking inside oneself, or
further through oneself into the outside
world. This writing is penetrating, slow,
stern and true like crushed flowers at the
curb”. – Natalia Kurchatova, for Fontanka.ru
“A spectacularly mature, fine and merciless text”. – Vechernyi Peterburg
“No surprise the author took his time
to write this novel: the text is more than
a container filled with fine, paradoxical and delicious details (Petersburg as
shown in the novel is exquisitely penetrating); the writer concocts the reality
with love angularly rough and reckless,
with a chronic hunger for a calm sleep,
with numerous roads and one fate hooking another”. – St Petersburg Vedomosti
“This is a book about an artist and society, how they interact; whether one can
be happy if the only thing of importance
for them is their realisation as an artist
and if they live in the world that is different from ours”. – Vse svobodny book
store
NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER PRIZE 2013
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RUSSIAN BOOKER & NATIONAL BESTSELLER 2012
Igor Sakhnovsky
Igor Sakhnovski was born in 1958 in Orsk. He studied Russian language and literature at the
State University of the Urals, then worked as a literary consultant and editor for a number of
publishers and magazines. He is co-founder of the weekly newspaper Book Club. His book e
Happy and the Mad, incorporating the novel e Vital Needs of the Dead and short stories, won
the 2003 Russian Decameron prize. e Man Who Knew Everything was short-listed for the National Bestseller Prize, and although it was not awarded the first prize, it was the absolute winner
according to readers’ polls. His novel e Vital Needs of the Dead has been translated into English, German, and French. Sakhnovski is also the author of two books of poems.
The Man Who Knew Everything
An unexpected solution to the trite dilemma of a common man up against to the
big world – from Igor Sakhnovsky, prize-winning author of e Happy and the Mad.
Written in the tradition of A Hero of Our Time and set in a puzzling modern world,
this brilliant new novel is destined to become a Russian classic.
Alexander Bezukladnikov is trapped in total misery: he can hardly make ends meet; his beloved
wife, sick and tired of poverty, dumps him for a
prosperous ex- sportsman; and there is no
chance for Bezukladnikov to get a better job because he is unable to keep up with the fastchanging social reality. ere is nothing le to do
but reach for an exposed electrical wire, hoping
for a quick death.
Vagrius, Moscow
2007, 272 pp
Awards:
Winner of the Boris
Strugatsky Bronze Snail
Award
Award 2007
Short-listed for the Russian
Booker Prize 2007
Bestseller Prize
Rights sold:
Italy Meridiano Zero/Odoya
France Gallimard
Serbia Stylos Art
Bulgaria Riva Publishers
Croatia Naklada LJEVAK
Publishers
Film rights sold prior to the
publication; the film was
released in 2009; director
Vladimir Mirzoev, starring
Ekaterina Guseva, Egor
Beroev and Maxim Sukhanov
Instead, he gets a new life. Aer being discharged
from a hospital, his scorched palms still in bandages, Bezukladnikov soon realises that he possesses a unique gi: he knows everything. e
only thing he has to do to get an answer to any
question, be it “how many eggs are there in the
fridge?” or “where can I get half a million dollars?”, is to ask himself a question. Bezukladnikov can now see anything that is happening, has
happened or is yet to happen to anyone. He is
supposed to be almighty – but instead, torpid
and inoffensive, he becomes the prey of thugs,
politicians, women, and international intelligence. Everybody pursues their own interests.
Some want to use Bezukladnikov, others to kill
him. But Bezukladnikov doesn’t play either their
game or his own. Although comparisons with Superman are there for the taking, Bezukladnikov
remains a Russian Forrest Gump, unintentionally
betraying the hopes of the crowd. Paradoxically,
all he uses his gi for is to protect himself from
those who are aer him.
Employing the plot of a blockbuster action thriller, the author masterfully creates a classic psychological story of an ordinary, touching, yet by
no means pathetic person, who tries to assert
his right to a private life.
“Sakhnovski has an innate keen eye, absolute pitch and tact, and – especially so – a deep feeling
of truth”. – Literaturnaya Gazeta
“This “euronovel” in a strange way reminds at once of Kurkov, Benacquista and Auster… The
wording, secret thoughts, literary allusions, ironic implications have been worked out exceptionally well”. – Afisha
Complete French and Italian translations are available
Igor Sakhnovsky
The Conspiracy of Angels
An unusual family chronicle about love, time, and auspicious coincidences, from the
author of the prizewinning e Man Who Knew Everything
Irkutsk, Egypt, Moscow, Hampshire. 16th century
Spain and Flanders, the invasion of the Ukraine
during World War II, evacuation, the Holocaust, a
small, Soviet-era industrial town in the Urals. is
unusual family chronicle is an intricate crossroads of far-flung love stories.
Astrel, AST, Moscow
2009, 380 pp
Rights sold:
France Gallimard
Option publishers:
Serbia Stylos Art
Publishers
English sample available
e narrator’s grandfather, Roman, is so profoundly in love with his wife that he goes through
the war without even noticing it. His wife, “Mama
Berta”, misses the train on which she and her
daughters are being evacuated, and three days
later, against all possible odds and the laws of
physics, catches up with it. e narrator’s father is
crazy about a woman who cannot belong to anyone – for which reason he leaves her and his children; yet hers is the name he utters again at the
very end of his life, when he is dying of cancer.
e narrator’s friend Arseniy confides a strange
secret to him: there is a portrait of a woman kept
in his family, and this woman appears to every
man of this family before his death. e woman,
as we eventually learn, is Maria del Rosario, who
either killed herself or disappeared more then two
centuries before. And is it just by chance that
Maria del Rosario bears a great resemblance to a
girl called Dina, an orphan, whose fragile, child-like
beauty produces an indelible impression on men?
Surprisingly, in the photos of Dina one never sees
her face: in its place is a white blur. e gothic
apocrypha about Maria del Rosario transmute
into the story of Mad Juana, medieval queen of
Castilla and Aragon, who was forced to marry a
womanizer, nevertheless fell madly in love with
him, and dragged his dead body around the desert
for four years aer he died. e court intrigues
against Juana are succeeded by scenes of a
wretched existence in a small industrial town in
the Urals, where the narrator lived as a child, and
his memories of his father’s death; which then
segue into his joyful and sensual trip around England with a beautiful red-haired woman.
All these odd yet delicate fragments form a perfect mosaic of a novel, the intricate pattern of
which seems to be inevitable – indeed, the only
one possible. Igor Sakhnovski, acknowledged
master of psychological prose, tells a story that
is both totally fantastic and profoundly true,
both intimate and multidimensional. e Conspiracy of Angels is a novel that insists that, in
this world full of lies and violence, there are still
“too many lucky coincidences”. is is a novel
about the physiology of miracle, about love,
about the non-existence of time.
The Vital Needs of the Dead
What needs might the dead have? Our loved ones stay with us aer they’ve gone.
Love, death and memory breathe in unison in the first novel by Igor Sakhnovsky.
A boy is growing up in a small Soviet town beyond the Urals. ere is a person in his life whose
unobtrusive devotion will stay with him and see
him through all hardships.
Vagrius, Moscow
1999,121 pp
Awards:
e Russian Decameron Prize
Nominated for Apollon Grigoryev
Literary Prize
Hawthornden Fellowship 2002 to
the translator for the English
translation of e Vital Needs of
the Dead
Rights sold:
World English Glagoslav
France Gallimard
Germany Reclam Verlag
Option publishers:
Serbia Stylos Art
Arab Scientific Publishers
is semi-biographical story of ‘sentimental education’ of a young man in a Russian province
chronicles his life from childhood to university
years, with his first love, to an older woman, his
attempt to break out of the provincial morass
and the choices he has to make. e book leaves
the reader sensing that there is ‘nothing more
terrifying, beautiful and fantastical than the socalled real life’ as the author puts it.
e book was highly acclaimed in Russia and
firmly established Igor Sakhnovsky as one of the
brightest literary voices in Russia today.
“Sakhnovski has a gift for describing what lies beneath the surface; describing what is, in fact,
the fleeting essence of everything that transpires”. – says Lyudmila Ulitskaya, internationally acclaimed author of Kukotsky Case and Daniel Stein, The Translator
“The Conspiracy of Angels is an exemplary novel. It contains everything a novel should – love to
the bitter end, history and myth, death and the return from hell…a talented, entertaining, intelligent, modern, and well-written novel”. – Openspace.ru
“This is a book that sows hope. It’s one of those stories about love, about the lucky and the mad, at
which Sakhnovsky excels”. – Chto chitat’
“Brilliant, amazing novel that one can’t but list among the greatest achievements of this years’
Russian prose…” – Chastny Correspondent
Complete English translation is available
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER PRIZE 2012
WINNER OF THE RUSSIAN LITERARY PRIZE 2008
Vladimir Lorchenkov
Vladimir Lorchenkov was born in 1979. A journalist and and prose writer, he was shortlisted and
won numerous literary prizes, including Debut Literary Prize and the Russian Literary Prize (for
fiction written in Russian by authors living outside Russia). Vladimir Lorchenkov is the author of
fourteen published books. Lorchenkov recently moved with his family to Canada.
Prizes:
Longlisted for Prix Medicis Etranger 2014
Shortlisted for the National Bestseller Prize 2012
Winner of Russian Literary Prize 2008
Winner of Debut Literary Prize
Milk and Honey
Like Saramago’s e Stone Ra, young prize-winning author Vladimir Lorchenkov
addresses both global issues of the human condition and topical matters of modern
European politics in his horrific, surrealistic novel.
LiveBooks, Russia
2008
Novel, 336 pp
40 000 words
Awards:
Longlisted for Prix Medicis
Etranger 2014, France
Russian Literary Prize 2008
Rights sold:
World English New Vessel
Germany Arche Verlag
France Mirobole Editions
France paperback Pocket
Italy Atmopshere Libri
Norway Libretto
Serbia Solaris
Finland Karisto
Spain Nevsky prospect
Poland Claroscuro
is is the phantasmagorical story of dwellers in
the small village of Larga, Moldova, neighbouring on Italy. True to Leo Tolstoy’s idea that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way,” every Largavite has
his/her own pitiful story, and all of them dream
of going to prosperous Italy as a solution to their
wretched existence. Italy, the land of milk and
honey, becomes their ultimate goal and obsession, and the dwellers of Larga will stop at nothing to reach the living paradise.
At first they sell all their property to pay 4000
Euros a head to swindlers, who, aer several
days of “traveling,” dump the Largavites on the
outskirts of Moldova’s capital city. Having failed
to reach their destination by a direct route, the
Largavites design an aircra out of an old trac-
tor – which gets shot up by stray fireworks on a
national holiday. ey then transform the remains into a submarine, only to have it sink by a
frontier post. ey master the sport of curling (to
take part in an international competition); and,
eventually, set off on a crusade, which at last
arouses the general concern of the EU.
Loss, shattered hopes, and broken lives become
the price the dwellers pay to realize an old
truth – we all bear a personal paradise and hell
within us.
Bitter, painfully sardonic and insightful, Milk and
Honey takes on a deeply tragic note, as it sharply
articulates universal assumptions that reveal
themselves in a subversive perspective.
Complete English translation is available
Vladimir Lorchenkov
Gypsy Camp: The Exodus
is harsh political grotesque from prize-winning author Vladimir Lorchenkov, who
“masters the challenge of introducing anecdote into myth” (Prochtenie Magazine),
secures his position as one of the boldest writers on the European literary scene
today.
Eksmo, Russia
2010
416 pp
Rights sold:
France Mirobole
Lorchenkov depicts Moldova as a devastated
state, where the government is inept and repressive. Hygiene, living conditions and morale
degrade swily, as the only functioning rule becomes the law of survival. Life migrates from
the country’s capital, now lying in ruins – an
ideal shelter for stray dogs and orphans – to
the Kasauts prison camp, where the number of
inmates grows daily, with new arrivals of former civil servants, businessmen, and representatives of the intelligentsia alike. e camp
becomes a bleak enclosure for death, violence,
and torture. e routine massacre deprives life
of all meaning, and convicts desperately seek
salvation in the new religion known as Exodus.
e doctrine of this religion teaches that Moldavians are a new chosen people. eir current
sufferings are a test of faith, with an imminent
reward: the bestowal of virgin land, free from
the filth and absurdity of their country.
e young Lieutenant Petresku drives with his
friend Vladimir Lorinkov, a drunkard and writer
turned museum guard, to the Kasauts prison
camp. Petresku hopes to expose the leader of
the Exodus sect and thus secure a promotion.
Lorinkov, too, has to set out on a journey: in an
alcohol-infused dream, he has seen a vision,
and now Lorinkov knows he will find the
Twelve, whoever or whatever that may be.
Petrika, a former language-college student
who now works on Portuguese tomato plantations, walks all the way back to Moldova in
search for his true love. e girl had been deported to Moldova, pregnant with Petrika’s
son. Aer three years he finally reaches the
country, only to find his beloved girlfriend Rodika scarcely alive, and already the mother of
two. e newly united family has no other place
to go if they wish to survive. e Kasauts prison
camp remains the only place where people can
earn a living in the country.
Pleshka, the head of the camp, is deeply in love
with the prostitute Nina, and even keeps a local
poet as his private prisoner to compose poems
in Nina’s honor. On a wild night of debauchery,
Pleshka orders that the poet be murdered, and
sends the poet’s head as a trophy to the capital
instead of the body of the sect’s leader. Pleshka orders that the latter be killed, too, but it is a
futile act: the leader’s spirit, as convicts insist,
simply inhabits the body of another convict.
Soon, Pleshka himself becomes an ardent follower of the Exodus doctrine. is is his only
chance to become a true national leader.
ey all become the group of Twelve, a dozen
terrorists who seize the world leaders at the
UN General Assembly, voicing a single demand:
the people of Moldova should receive their
promised land.
If Irvine Welsh were to write Saramago’s Blindness, setting it in Moldova, we would probably
be reading…a different story. Gypsy Camp: e
Exodus is a noir epic from the author who selfmockingly calls himself “the only Russian-language writer in Moldova”. It offers a rich mixture of Lorchenkov’s signature prose:
grotesque, noir humor, an artful balance between comedy and tragedy, and a masterly
pastiche of modern Moldavian locutions.
WINNER OF THE RUSSIAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008
Mikhail Elizarov
Mikhail Elizarov was born in 1973 in Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine. He studied philology in Kharkov
State University and film direction in the Fine Arts Academy. In the late nineties Mikhail worked
as a cameraman.
In 2001 he continued studying in Germany, where he now lives. He contributes to a number of
newspapers and magazines, such as Playboy, GQ, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Mikhail is the author of six, including collections of short stories and novels (Pasternak, Librarian,
Cartoons). All of them were nominated for major literary prizes.
Librarian
Borges meets Sorokin in “an atomic bomb of a novel for the progressive reader”,
from the best-selling author of Nails and Pasternak.
e Socialist realism novels by Gromov, some
mediocre Soviet author who died in the eighties totally forgotten, suddenly become a treasure: it is discovered that the books possess
magic powers. If read intently, they can change
the physical condition, the state of mind, and
psyche of a reader, each book in its own way.
e boring novels with original titles like “Fly,
Happiness!” or “Silver Valley” are actually the
Book of Power, Book of Memory, Book of
Wrath, Book of Joy, and Book of Strength, and
affect a reader correspondingly.
Ad Marginem, Russia
2007, 448 pp
85 000 words
Awards:
e Russian Booker Prize
2008
Rights sold:
World English Pushkin
Press
Italy Atmosphere libri
France Calmann Levy
Denmark Vandkunsten
Estonia Varrak
Japan Kawade Shobo
Arabic Esperanto for Culture
and Arts
Serbia
Bulgaria
Croatia
China
In “Gromov’s” reality, where the books – or
rather the effects they produce – become the
most appreciated value, people who once read
a novel of Gromov’s are obsessed with getting
the other ones. is results in the emergence
of half-mystical, half-military sects called “libraries” (sometimes in quite unsuitable places,
such as prisons or old people’s homes), each
run by a “Librarian” In their quest for Gromov’s
books, the libraries cooperate or fight with
each other, with kitchen knives and ladles for
armaments and old car tyres for protection,
sometimes with devastating outcomes. e
ultimate goal of all the libraries is to find the
banned Book of Meaning, the entire edition of
which was destroyed due to Krushchev’s antiStalin campaign.
Oblivious of the existence of “Gromov’s universe”, a young man named Alexei Vyazintsev
arrives in a provincial town, coming into possession of a flat inherited from his deceased
uncle – but instead finds himself in the possession of another inheritance. His uncle was an
influential “librarian”, and now Alexei is to take
his place. He will fight together with the members of his library for Gromov’s books, until he
reaches the long-desired one, the Book of
Meaning, to discover the greatest, and probably the weirdest, secret of all.
Mikhail Elizarov creates shocking descriptions,
picturesque battle scenes, and yearning pathos, entangled in all-enveloping irony, to draw
the reader implicitly into a world where reading
is the only possible mode of existence for both
individual and nation.
Over 50 000 copies sold
LOVE. ADVENTURE. HISTORY.
Anastasia Edel
Anastasia Edel , born 1972, grew up in a small town in the south of Russia during the last years
of the Soviet Union. She graduated with a degree in Romance Philology and worked as a fiction translator. Aer receiving the British Government Chevening Award in 1995, she moved
to England to study for her MBA and then to the US, where she earned an MFA in Fiction from
Pacific University. Past Perfect is her first novel. Edel is currently working on Intersections, a
story collection, one of which received an Honorable Mention from the Glimmer Train New
Writers Contest. She lives with her family in Piedmont, California.
Awards:
British Government Chevening Award, 1995
Glimmer Train 2013 Short Story Award For New Writers, Honorable Mention, “Snow”
Bibilography:
Past Perfect: A Novel, 2015
Intersections: Stories, 2015
Learning from the Classics: A Collection of Cra Essays, 2014
Past Perfect
Love, history and adventure weave together to make an arresting tale about a young New
Yorker lost in the ancient Rome.
Love adventure, history
2015
304 pp
105 000 words
Original language:
English
Helen Orloff, a recent Columbia University linguistics graduate, comes to Provence for a friend’s
wedding and to recover from a painful break-off. A
few hours before her return flight to New York,
Helen wanders into a tiny bookstore to make a
random purchase of a Latin-language edition of
Virgil’s Aeneid. e storeowner then drives Helen
to the Fréjus amphitheater, the last stop on her
brief vacation itinerary. e tour cuts short as
Helen faints by the ruins – and wakes up in 45 BC
in Gaul (ancient France), recently conquered by
Julius Caesar.
Mistaken by the Romans for a Gallic spy, Helen
faces torture and death; however, her claims of
knowing the future catch the attention of Marcius
Brutus Albinus, Caesar’s right hand in Gaul. An
heir of one of Rome’s most prominent families,
Marcius is fascinated by the idea that Helen might
be a messenger of the gods, sent to help him save
the Republic from civil strife. Realizing that Marcius is her only chance for survival, Helen successfully peddles the oracle theme, relying on her college Latin and her iPhones’ bag of tricks.
Stripped of all gains of modern civilization—gender equality, freedom, medicine—and without an
obvious way back, Helen has to survive the ancient world by her wits. She succeeds strikingly
well, and even saves the young proconsul’s life in
the Gallic attack en route to the province’s capital.
As Helen agonizes over the reasons why she has
been dropped in the ancient past and is haunted
by the fears she might not be able to ever return
to her “real-time” life, she feels that she is undeniably drawn to Marcius. Of the many affinities they
share, one is for Hector and Andromache, Homer’s par excellence antiquity couple. To Helen, Andromache’s tragic fate becomes a quintessential
manifestation of the backseat love takes on the
train of history. at same love that she herself
cannot resist.
As Helen and Marcius grow closer, she must decide how much she can tell him about his future
and his imminent role in history; from Shakespeare, she knows well that a man named Brutus
(Marcius’ second name) will stab Caesar on the
Ides of March.
e couple’s unlikely alliance sets off a chain of
events that puts their assumptions about life,
duty, love and their place in the world to the test.
An irresistibly gripping tale, remarkable for a rare
authenticity and the author’s obvious expert
knowledge of the antique history and literature,
Past Perfect appeals to a vast readership of the
educated readers and lovers of history and love
adventures alike.
Elena Kolina
Elena Kolina was born in St Petersburg into an academic family. She has a degree in Mathematics,
as well as Psychology and Language. She teaches psychology and English at the St Petersburg’s
College of Culture. Elena Kolina is the bestselling author of over a dozen of books, among which
is A New Russian’s Diary, translated into several languages. Most of Kolina’s books are being
made into films. She is married with two children.
Bibilography:
Poor Rich Girls - novel, 2003
Goldmans Saga - novel, 2004
A New Russian’s Diary - novel, 2005
A New Russian’s Diary. Book2 - novel, 2005
Diary of Infidelity - novel, 2007
Lads and Gals - 2008, novel
Four sisters - 2009, novel
e Last But One Truth; Despite My Wishes; What’s the Film About? -- trilogy, novels, 2012
An Education
If Erlend Loe decided to write a story about a boy coming of age in St Petersburg in the
early 90s, the result could well be An Education — frank, laugh-out-loud and clever, and the
most captivating story to come out of Russia in recent years. Elena Kolina succeeds brilliantly in coining the most original, funny, and catchy ABC-introduction to modern art ever
to appear in a novel.
An Education
Novel, AST, 316pp
2015
Rights sold:
All rights available
e narrator of the story, 16-year-old Pyotr Tchaikovsky, was named not aer the great Russian composer, but rather aer the famous sculptor Pyotr
Klodt, whose signature sculpture, a group of horses,
is installed at the Anichkov bridge—which is the view
from the window of the communal apartment where
the Tchaikovskys reside. e flat’s unique view will
play a crucial role in the life of the Tchaikovsky family,
and, more particularly, in Pyotr’s life, when Roman, a
businessman, decides to buy their flat in the notorious mid-nineties, offering each resident an individual
property (a true luxury at the time) in the city’s outskirts. Pyotr misses “his” horse (which the boy used
to watch every morning from his bed), and every day
aer school the boy runs to his childhood stomping
grounds. ere he bumps into the new owner of their
apartment and receives his first job offer: the boy
will babysit “the Beast”, Roman’s 6-year-old son.
When Pyotr accepts, he cannot imagine that this job
will open doors for him, not only to his former flat,
but also to a bright new chaotic, and oen absurd,
world — of random people attracted by Roman’s ingenious charm; of easy money; of brilliant entrepreneurial ideas and high ambitions.
e circle of Roman’s acquaintances ranges from
the glamorous prostitutes who frequent Nevsky
prospect (this is how Pyotr meets Jeanne, his first
love), city officials, bankers and journalists, to bodyguards, and even bona fide bandits. Yet the person
who is destined to change Pyotr’s life is not Jeanne,
nor any of Roman’s influential friends, nor even Roman himself. is person will be Nelli (or NN, as the
children call her), an old friend of Roman’s father, an
art critic and a popular figure in St Petersburg’s bohemian art circles. Roman hires NN as a tutor for his
eldest daughter, the spoiled, yet vulnerable 16-yearold Alisa, when the girl has to spend three months at
home with a broken leg. Suffering from an eating
disorder that results in a physical obesity, Alisa lacks
her father’s charm, but has inherited his intellect. At
once self-conscious and impudent, open-minded yet
aggressive, Alisa is set on getting what she desires:
the girl realizes that she cannot become an intellectual in three months time, yet she can learn to appear to be one, if NN gives her the right “cultural
codes”. NN embraces the challenge of Professor
Higgins’ role with the eagerness of an essentially
lonely person. She introduces the demanding Alisa
and Pyotr, an unwitting yet ardent witness of their
studies, to the world of music, art, and literature
through easy passcodes, key phrases, and names
that — if uttered at the right time and with the proper intonation — should give one the appearance of a
true intellectual. Each day of these unusual studies
draws the teenagers and their eccentric tutor closer,
until they all become hostages of Roman’s business
practices — literally locked in the flat by gangsters.
eir worlds inevitably collide in an explosively dramatic outcome.
e author succeeds in masterfully rendering the
story through the naïve and simple voice of an openminded teenager. e narrator does not attempt to
sort out the behaviour of the elders; he is as yet unable to navigate through cultural stereotypes and
everyday social reactions. However, the boy’s penetratingly fresh eye notes every minute detail, which
allows the reader to reconstruct a complete picture
of events and make his own judgments.
An Education lingers with you and prompts continuous responses and reactions, as it speaks of profound and universal issues in an easy and penetratingly personal way, with a catchy lightness of touch.
Elena Kolina brilliantly balances sentimentality, naivety, absurdity, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of
cultural facts, resulting in a smart and genuinely
moving novel.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NEW LITERATURE PRIZE 2012
Yana Vagner
Yana Vagner was born in Moscow in 1973 into a bilingual family. Her Czech mother came to Moscow in the 60s to study Russian language and literature. Yana graduated from Moscow State
University with a major in management and has worked as an interpreter, an anchorperson on
radio, and a logistics manager, which allowed her to travel extensively throughout Africa, Europe
and Latin America. Yana Vagner lives with her husband, teenage son, and three dogs in their country house on the outskirts of Moscow. e author’s blog is define_violence.livejournal.com.
2012 – Vongozero: Truly Human. Book Two – novel
2011 – Vongozero – novel
2011 – Sunny Mood, short story anthology – selected short stories
2010 – Fox Honor, short story anthology – selected short stories
Vongozero
In her debut post-apocalyptic thriller Yana Vagner refers simultaneously to Stephen
King’s e Stand, Cormac McCarthy’s e Road and the popular TV show Man vs.
the Wild – and yet the author concocts a strikingly visionary survival story in its own
right. Written at the time of the H1N1 flu epidemic and coming out as weekly entries
in Vagner’s blog, Vongozero – a haunting and arresting tale of a young woman who
attempts to survive with her family during the throes of a pandemic – had already
won thousands of readers before its publication as a book, setting off a heated auction among major Russian publishers.
riller, road- story
Exmo, Russia, 2011, 448pp
113 000 words
Awards:
Longlisted for e New
Literature Prize 2012,
e National Bestseller Prize
2012
Shortlisted for Prix
Russophonie
Shortlisted for Prix Bob
Morane 2015
Finalist of the Grand Prix des
lectrices Elle
Rights sold:
English UK Skyscraper
(two book deal)
France paperback Pocket
Sweden Ersatz
Slovakia Ikar
Slovenia Mladinska knjiga
Založba
Czech Euromedia
Poland Zysk
Lithuania Alma Littera
Arabic Esperanto
Film Rights:
Art Pictures, Russia
What begins as a flu epidemic rapidly transmutes into a national catastrophe; but in the
first days there’s little panic. Anya, the story’s
narrator, 36-years old, was married three years
before the events and now resides with her husband Sergei and her teenage son Misha in their
country house outside of Moscow. ey remain
oblivious to the scope of the danger until the authorities send out troops to close down the major cities for entry, dooming their inhabitants to a
swi yet painful death. Panic triggers violence,
looting and devastation.
Anya and Sergei have both le family members
behind in Moscow, and while Sergei succeeds in
rescuing his ex- wife with their 3- year old son,
Anya’s mother gets infected and dies in the city
under siege. Anya’s father arrives just prior to
the appearance of the first looters in the settlement, a direct warning to the family. ey choose
to flee to a shabby getaway house at the Vongozero lake near the Finnish border, where Sergei had stayed a few times on hunting trips. Born
out of necessity, the expedition grows into eight
adults and three children in four crossovers,
loaded with belongings and fuel. Mortal danger
draws together this weird and ill- assorted group
of fellow travelers, speeding to the north of the
rapidly deteriorating country.
Scheduled as a 48-hour journey, the road trip
turns into twelve days of nightmare, dreary an-
ticipation of grief, worry, and struggle. As this
highway trip escalates into a test of ultimate
survival, the fellow travelers have to find the
strength and resources not only to fight against
the looming external dangers, but to face the
deepest corners of themselves. ere are no
guarantees, no rules, and no truths outside
those that help them to survive. e road challenges the limits of human nature, measuring
compassion against the thirst for living, the
strength of family ties against jealousy and exasperation – and forces each traveler to pay the
utmost cost for survival.
e sweeping avalanche of a road story stops
short at the destination point: a tiny shelter on
the shore of the ice-covered Vongozero lake in
the freezing taiga forest. e protagonists now
have time to weep for those who failed to reach
the final point and to attempt to build out of the
ruins and rubble a new routine, a new code, a
new life, and possibly new selves.
As horrifying as one’s worst nightmares, the
novel reads as a very plausible scenario. Yana
Vagner demonstrates outstanding writing skills
and deep psychological insight as she sets out
the simplest and at the same time the most
complicated question before her characters and
readers: what does it take to remain human in
the face of mortal danger?
Complete French translation and English sample available
Yana Vagner
Vongozero
Selected quotes
“This is a road story, a running- fromthe-approaching-wave-story, a simple
yet unusual genre. Nearly 450 pages
of a white (it’s winter) road with few
turnings in the plot, but with many
twists and turns of the route and the car
wheels. Over a thousand kilometers of
a nonstop buzz of panic. Did I mention
the avalanche? – without this symbol the
review wouldn’t have been complete”. –
Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, the national prizewinning author of The Siege Novel and
The Month of Arcachon.
Readers’ quotes from the blog
The novel’s strong point is that there’s
no falsehood in it. All the observations
about human nature strike the reader as
definitive and psychologically true. This
is definitely beguiling.
The novel is so gripping that I keep feeling relieved every time I finish a piece
and realize that it’s fiction, and that I live
here, in the real world.
I basically just can’t get how you do this.
Everything looks so simple and so deep
at the same time. The story refuses to let
you go, as if it’s really happening out
there and your blog is the news source
following the events. From time to time
I catch myself remembering an episode,
and I have to remind myself that this
happened in a novel, not in real life.
I have never been a fan of this genre. But
it’s 4 am and I am reading your work,
which has been published in excerpts
in your blog, and I cannot stop. I only
got distracted once to get some tea and
make myself a meal. It’s so gripping and
so visual – as if I’ve just finished watching a movie. As if I have met all these
people! I cannot wait to read the sequel.
I have never read anything so captivating, gripping and penetrating. Your
characters become flesh and blood, as
if I know them personally. And I catch
myself at wondering whether I have an
emergency kit, warm clothes, a sleeping
bag, and food that can be stored away.
I know what attracts me most – the fact
that you don’t judge, leaving the judgment up to the reader. There’re no good
or bad characters, there’s no evil or
good, they are put into believable situations where they have to make decisions
and take action, just like any of us would.
I’m not really interested in the storyline
- it’s just that you write with such certainty and rhythm that I cannot stop
reading.
You create such a dense atmosphere and
plot that it makes a very cinematographic impression. Reading it is like watching
a film – a film with sounds and smells.
Your characters are all very different
from each other, and the text makes me
worry not just for them but for myself - if
anything like this were to happen to me,
how would I act?
I believe now that I know what true
horror is – it’s grey, indifferent, and inevitable.
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER PRIZE 2014
IN THE YOUNG WRITERS NOMINATION
Anna Starobinets
Anna Starobinets is 35 years old. She is a journalist and contributor to a number of established publications, such as Expert and Russian Reporter, writing on cultural issues. She is
also a succesful scriptwriter with two of her film scripts turned into feature films. e Awkward Age, her collection of short stories, has been translated into a number of languages,
including English (Hesperus). e list of her prose includes the novel Refuge F/A (2007); Cold
Spell (2008), a collection of short novels; e First Squad. e Moment of Truth (2010), a tiein; a collection of short stories Icarus Gland (2013), English rights sold to Skyscraper; as well
as a number of books for children. All of her novels were nominated for the National Bestseller Prize and in 2014 Starobinets won National Bestseller Prize in the Young Writers
nomination. Anna lives in Moscow and is married to Alexander Garros, the well-known author
of international bestseller Headcrusher.
“This is one of the most stunning debuts to come out of Russia since Victor Pelevin: hip, funny, angry, and dark as hell. <…> With one
foot in the high literary camp and the other in genre (but never generic) horror, Starobinets establishes herself as the 21st-century
Gogol, mapping a twisted road to the dark and absurd heart of Russia.” – Booktrust
“This girl seems to have an absolute handle on what reality actually is.” – Afisha
“She writes with delicate verbal grace, never losing it to a whine.” – Time-Out
The Living
A brave new dystopia from the “Russian horror queen,” who this time steps into the
territory of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
AST, Moscow
April 2011, 286 pp
Sci-fi
Rights sold:
UK Hesperus
Spain Nevsky Prospect
Italy Atmosphere Libri
Sweden Ersatz
Awards:
Finalist of the National
Longlisted for the the
Premio Ignotus for Best
Foreign Novel 2014
Aer a global catastrophe called the Great Reduction, the number of people living on Earth has
become fixed, remaining a constant 3 billion.
is stability is based on the common notion of
continual reincarnation. ere is no death, as the
main social byword suggests – just a brief
“pause,”or “ninety seconds of darkness”. Aer
these ninety seconds a person is conceived
again. No wonder all humankind is considered to
be one composite organism called e Living.
Every person has an in-code that keeps track of
information about all their previous incarnations.
Family and country are now of no importance.
Every person can be reborn anywhere on the
planet, issuing from their previous incarnations
rather than biological parents. Society is global,
and attachment to parents and children is denounced as a deviation. All people (or, rather, all
the particles of e Living) in this society are connected directly from the brain to the social network (called Socio), where they can surf on various levels simultaneously. Needless to say, the
first level – that of reality itself – is barely used,
and usually ignored.
e particles of e Living live happily and die
happily, according to a government-determined
schedule, and it seems that nothing can threaten this stability. Yet… there is one man born
without an in-code (i.e. without previous incarnations) – a spare human being. His birth increases
the number of e Living by one, which threatens the harmony of e Living. So who is Zero?
is is the question Zero himself is desperate to
answer. From early childhood he shows deviations. He is attached to his mother; he is loved by
pets, who normally are scared of e Living. After his mother’s death he is sent to the correction center where kids with bad “karma”are
kept. ere he makes friends with Cracker, who
actually invented Socio in one of his previous incarnations. Cracker helps Zero to flee and to
eventually find out that this whole comfortable,
logical, and fair world rests on lies. It is probable
that even the proverbial “incarnation” is just a
result of astute manipulation. Zero soon gets to
know that the slogan “ere is no death” is
meaningless – actually, it’s all there is.
Anna Starobinets
REFUGE F/A
A metaphysical thriller reminiscent of American Gods from the author who was once
announced to have beaten both Steven King and David Kronenberg.
Masha, a photo journalist, goes to a Paris book
fair, where step by step, haunted by nightmares
and vague memories of her lost son, she is transforming into a tramp. At some stage, looking in
the mirror, she can’t recognize herself and starts
to be referred to as he. “And then it all began. And
there was no me any more”...
Novel, horror, 350 p
2006, 2011
Limbus Press
AST, Russia
Joseph is put into an Italian prison to pick strawberries and when trying to escape is transforming into a... spider. “I am still here, alive – but even
so something has changed. Something has
changed very sharply”...
A boy with a cranial trauma is put into a good
quality hospital that turns out to be inhabited by
other-worldly creatures…
So there is another world interfering with the real
one. Both worlds are interconnected and they
are getting closer and closer to become one in
the end. Any action, which takes place in one of
the worlds, echoes in the other. A girl who has
been in a coma for years can be a Sleeping Beauty. A ridiculous red-haired woman always mumbling something to herself can easily turn the
President into a zombie. And a broken needle can
cause a true Apocalypse...
Anna Starobinets’ unadorned and clear yet sensitive and convincing language enables her to create as many worlds as she wants in a detailed
and careful manner, and all the worlds mirror the
pivot of the novel: a poignant personal story of
loneliness and betrayal.
Rights sold:
Spain Nevsky prospect
France Agullo Editions
The Awkward Age
Stephen King meets Franz Kaa in the riveting stories by a new sensational Russian author. e author plunges the reader into a world where the reality shis and
flexes. e off-beat and original stories, nominated for the National Bestseller Prize
2004, are reminiscent of such mystery gurus as Steven King and Shirley Jackson
and at the same time follow the tradition of the classical Russian storytelling.
Novella and short stories
240 pp
Rights sold:
UK Hesperus
Italy isbn edizioni
France Mirobole
Spain Nevsky Prospect
Poland Prozynski
Bulgaria Colibri
Arabic Yola Cultural
Exchange
Japan Kawade Shobo
Awards:
Winner of the Premio Nocte
for Best Foreign Story, Spain
Longlisted for the the
Premio Ignotus for Best
Foreign Story, Spain
Nominated for for Le Prix
Masterton, France
A boy turning into the anthill is the striking metaphor of the awkward age developed in the
head title. An ant-queen gets into his head
through the ear when he is six and starts setting
the ant colony inside his body, believing that
such symbiotic existence can open the new horizons for the ants. e story sounds in three
authentic voices: the boy’s mother’s, his twinsister’s and his own. e most stunning part of
the novella is the boy’s diary. His voice, so touching in the first entries, little by little turns into
the collective voice of the ants living inside him
and making him obey their needs. Having started as a family story about a divorced mother
with two kids who have to live through the awkward age, the narrative switches unexpectedly
to a nearly Kaaesque one.
Shape-shiing and blurring the boundaries between the real and the illusionary is the technique being perfected in the short stories. Playing with the conflicting emotions, making the
reader experience the mixture of disgust and
tenderness towards the protagonists, Anna creates the authentic, if oen strange, characters:
Two lovers in the apocalyptic Moscow settings,
neither of whom knows that they are both dead.
An agent working for a “coincidence management” agency, who turns out to be chasing himself. A lonely guy who cherishes a saucepan forgotten in the fridge and thus turns it into a
loveable monster. A man traveling between two
towns unable to figure out which one of them is
real. A child who kills his mother for not keeping
the rules of his secret game.
e madness in the stories is entangled with the
ordinary; the nightmare dissolves in the mundane. e prose style is unadorned and clear.
Anna Starobinets’ imagination and remarkable
grasp of reality at its most inexplicable leaves us
wondering: is the world really something we
have always believed it to be?
THE BIG BOOK AWARD 2012 (READER’S CHOICE)
RUSSIAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008
Maria Galina
Maria Galina – poet, novelist, literary critic – was born in 1958 in Kalinin (Tver). She graduated
from the Faculty of Biology of the Odessa State University with postgraduate studies in
Hydrobiology and ichthyology. Has a PhD in marine biology, participated in various expeditions,
and in 1994 – under contract to work at the University of Bergen (Norway) – she made scientific
studies of salmon populations. She has been living in Moscow since 1987.
Her first poems were published in the Odessa newspaper Antarctica, and her first poetry
publication in the national press was in the Youth journal in 1990. Since 1995, Galina has been a
professional writer. Her science fiction debut came with the 1997 novel Time of the Losers,
published – as were a few subsequent novels – under the pseudonym Max Golitsyn. From 1998
to 2001 she worked in the department of literature of the Literary Gazette, where she was in
charge of a science fiction section as well as the poetry headline Poetry non-stop. Author of
numerous articles published in the Literary Gazette, New World, Znamya and others, editor and
compiler of the intellectual science fiction series The Other Side for the Forum publishing house,
and a member at the literary critics section of The New World magazine.
Maria Galina is a member of the Moscow Writers’ Guild, has been a jury member at numerous
literary fiction awards, and has worked in the advisory council for the Big Book Award. She has
translated prose (mainly English-speaking authors, including Stephen King, Jack Vance, Clive
Barker, Peter Straub) and poetry (Ukrainian poets) into Russian.
Recipient of the The New World magazine’s Anthologia Award (for the highest achievement in
modern Russian poetry) and the Moscow Count Award. Maria Galina’s works have been translated
into English, Italian and Polish.
Mole Crickets
Mole Crickets, Maria Galina’s highly praised and lavishly awarded novel, begins
with an ironic salute to Neil Gaiman’s I, Cthulhu, and grows into a disturbing tale of
modern men who are apt to compromise their own identity in a doomed chase after phantasms, in multiplying, self-engulfing realities.
Exmo, 2011
320 pp, 64 000 words
Magical realism
Awards:
Readers’ Choice at e Big
Book Award 2012
Book of the Year by Fantlab
2012
e Pilgrim (Strannik) Award
2012
Senya Blinkin, a self-conscious, melancholic sociopath suffering from numerous nervous ailments and quirks, is a mediocre literary talent
with deep psychological insight and an inventive mind. He earns his living through writing
fiction for private customers. Blinkin involves
his customers in fiction stories – whether
brand new novels or rehashed classics – and
thus helps them conquer their deepest phobias
and psychological traumas. One customer
marches along with hobbits in a quest to fight
the evil lord; another sails with pirates and
saves a beautiful captain’s daughter; yet another explores cosmic universes. A proper literary expert, Blinkin finds a truly unique fictional
reality for each customer. One day, however, he
receives a puzzling order. An influential businessman asks the writer to concoct a detailed
background for him. ere’s nothing in his childhood as an orphan that he wants restored and
preserved – so why not write him a new life? A
family tree with stories and anecdotes and artifacts and photographs, a life he could truly experience. e farther Blinkin proceeds in this
task, the more real becomes his fictional invention. Soon the line between the real and the irrational blurs, and the metaphysical world
changes places with the real one, as the door
to an alien horror is thrown open.
e inscription “Cthulhu is coming,” with a
countdown of days, appears in a puddle at the
doorstep, followed by a gothic looking teenage
girl who makes herself at home in Blinkin’s
house. A few artifacts bought in a flea market
for his customers are linked to Blinkin’s own
family, and his father eagerly welcomes a replacement of his failing son in the successful
businessman. e writer’s neighbor, an eccentric researcher, reveals a theory that Achilles
never was a Greek hero, but a chthonic monster, the son of the evil ancient goddess Hecate,
and there are signs of his imminent comeback.
e neighbor gets arrested soon aer, charged
with murdering his wife; but the writer thinks
he, too, can see the signs.
Maria Galina writes in a signature style, weaving genres, the real and the metaphysical,
phantasmagoria and pastiche, into her story.
ere are no alien monsters in Galina’s text, yet
the horror leaks through the thin film that covers her fictional world. Maria Galina is primarily
interested in the monsters within us, and she
investigates the human soul through a looking
glass of myths and lore with singular brilliance.
Maria Galina
Mole Crickets
“Almost all her work, independent of
the level of rhythmicality of the form, is
located in a strange, in-between world,
in the gap between the fantastic and the
realist text. Nevertheless, it results not
in a moribund homunculus with poor
coordination and incoherent speech,
but an absolutely vital, multi-faceted
creature with a broad spectrum of
possibilities”. – Chascor
“The novel warms up and buzzes; how to
interpret this beautiful music, however,
is unclear. Strange business, strange
family ties, strange neighbors, strange
thoughts, strange love; the plot lines run
all over the place, but the novel doesn’t
fall apart. The subject sticks together
due to the spittle of the narrator, which
contains a special secretion that makes
words cohere”. – Lev Danilkin for Afisha
“Maria Galina has written a strange
book. In places frightening, in places
funny, in places hard to comprehend.
This is a sad story about people who
are weak and closed up in the shells of
their worldviews, who try in every way
possible to brighten up their gray lives”.
– Knigi X
“Her current novel resembles a Rorschach
blot, and every reader will bring
something different away from it. One
person will read a story about loneliness
and madness; another about chthonic
powers gradually taking over the world;
another about the secret meaning of
blood ties. Or, at worst, about the seamy,
dark side of the writer’s craft. For Galina,
this theme would seem to be quite a
familiar one”. – Itogi
“Through all this chthonic magnificence,
simple human truths break through: it’s
too easy to get lost in the game. Madeup relatives turn out to be much more
pleasant than blood relatives. The world
of illusion is more attractive than the real
world”. – Psychologies
“The reader who wants to find a world
that is familiar, but magical and as yet
unexplored, would do well to turn to the
new prose of Maria Galina. openspace.ru
One of the few works with a very long
and bitter-sweet aftertaste”. – Novyi mir,
No. 5, 2011
“Maria Galina’s novel is about this, as
well – about how one can conjure up
or charm any reality, with a conspiracy,
an incantation, the power of the
imagination, or a desperate dream; and
even the most innocent intellectual
literary or psychological game can lead to
unpredictable consequences. vedomosti
Serious adult prose, for repeated reading
and unhurried reflection”. – mirf.ru
“Anyone
can
write
a
boring,
incomprehensible novel. Maria Galina
has done something improbable – she
has written a compelling, spellbinding
book that no one can fully understand.
– Chitaem Vmeste
I“n Mole Crickets the consciousness of
the human being and the world in which
he lives is dissected so deeply, in so many
layers, that the skeleton of existence is
revealed – again, the myth is understood
here not only as a theme or metaphorical
system, but first and foremost as a
particular mode of thinking, a mode of
being [ . . . .] The global misalignment
of the world and the human being is
alarming and unsettling, and generates
that instability of reality around which
the novel is built”. – Mikhail Nazarenko
Maria Galina
Little Boondock
Maria Galina, like Stalker from the Strugatsky brothers’ true classic Roadside Picnic and the eponymous film, guides her readers through the strange reality of a Soviet Russian province in this dramatic, ruthless quest in search of our true selves.
Eksmo, Russia
2009, 250 pp
65 000 words
Awards:
Award 2009
Longlisted for the Russian
Booker Prize 2009
Winner of e Marble Faun
Award 2010
Winner of e Portal Prize
2010
Winner of e Silver
Caduceus Award 2009
Inna and Evgeniy meet by chance on the road to
the small, remote Russian village of Malaya Glusha (the Russian name can be loosely translated as Little Boondock). Inna, 38, comes from
this area; she works as a receptionist in a local
clinic. Evgeniy, five years her junior, has just arrived from Moscow. He is a top civil service officer in the ministry of sea transportation.
ese two would never have met under ordinary circumstances. Even if they had, they
would not have found common interests or topics of conversation (whether her expert knowledge of bird species, or his vast collection of
foreign films). But they both missed the bus,
and while hitchhiking were picked up by that
same car – which broke down midway through
the journey. Now they must walk through the
fields to Little Boondock. She is sweating in a
cheap synthetic blouse and fluffy house slippers that she puts on instead of her heels, and
carries a heavy suitcase (probably with gis for
her aunt on this long overdue visit). He carries a
lightweight, brightly colored backpack, a typical
tourist from the capital exploring Russia’s
backwoods provinces.
e heroes stay overnight in a neighboring village. Evgeniy finds a hospitable refuge in the
home of a teacher of local history and folklore,
a recent widower. eir quiet cozy talk over tea
on a warmly lit veranda is interrupted by the arrival of the hostess at sunset. Evgeniy chooses
to ignore the light whiff of damp earth clinging
the teacher’s wife and explains it away by her
healthy, earthy wholesomeness. In the morning
he wanders to a local cemetery, only to discover a headstone bearing the name of the kind
hostess. Evgeniy sets off, leaving his things behind. He is not urged on by fear; it is hope that
“An unexpected twist on a theme as
old as the world. Little Boondock is
aimed at the adult reader. The novel is
discomfiting; it can be sad, painful, and
even repugnant, which distinguishes it
favorably from its saccharine, soppy, selfaggrandizing counterparts in the fantasy
mass market. It falls completely within
the tradition of great prose”. – Oleg
Divov, bestselling, prize-winning sci-fi
and fantasy author.
“The plot boils down to a journey by the
protagonist to the other side of the river
and a meeting with the one he was so
desperate to find – but this is a journey
in a non-dimensional, hollow time, a
journey in which every step, every choice
can mean its opposite, and the nearer
one gets to one’s goal, the more one risks
losing oneself”. – Slovosfera, a literary
portal.
gives his feet wings.
Evgeniy is not surprised when he spots his fellow traveller in the woods. He can now reveal
the true reason for his journey – he wants to
return his wife, who died in a tragic accident together with their toddler, a few years before,
both run over by a truck on a highway. Inna confesses that she is going to Little Boondock to
recover her son, who died in action in the Afghan war.
e heroes will have to endure exorbitant trials
and live through truly metaphysical horror. Finding themselves inside their worst nightmares,
they will even have to kill a person during one
dramatic episode of their quest. Armed with
love or guilt, they both get to Little Boondock
and cross over the river. ey both change
along the way, but finally reach their destination and find their loved ones. Yet who waits for
them behind the river? In the world of the dead,
Inna finally understands that she tortured her
son with her love, actually pushing him away to
war. e modern Orpheus, too, learns to adjust
to a painful realization: it was not only love that
he had felt toward his dead wife. It is then that
the heroes face the most difficult choice they
have to make.
Maria Galina has written a ruthless parable.
She excels in bringing together common folklore with a keen investigation of human psychology. Galina uses the mechanisms of ancient
myth to reveal passion, impotence, and fear in
her characters. In the melancholic pace of Galina’s writing, every detail and word is charged
with extra meaning, turning this fantastic quest
into a literary tour de force.
“Here the past becomes the place of
action – the same as the world of the
dead in Little Boondock or the port
city in SCE-2. I repeat, it is not a time,
but a place; and this place, which many
of Galina’s readers still remember, is
peopled with demons”. – Openspace.ru
“We see an insane, desperate attempt
to rectify something, to restore love
– literally from the next world. Little
Boondock is a story about submersion,
in which there is a metaphor of a
half-forgotten time, when a country
befuddled with counterfeit progress
sinks into a primitive, lawless existence.
Knizhnaya vitrina
“The territory of personal happiness
available to Evgeny and Inna is only a
murky interim world, born of egotism
and passion, which they mistakenly
perceived as genuine love”. – Chaskor.ru
Poet, woman of letters, erudite and
healthy cynic, Maria Galina creates
strange stories at the junction of the
genre of philosophical fantasy, beloved
by the Russian intelligentsia, and the
women’s version of magical realism
a la Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. In the
two stories included in this book and
palpably echoing one another, one can
discern a thriller, a fairy tale, and social
allegory. Galina very deftly combines
genre constructs with a popularizer’s
mission, fantasy with philosphy, cynicism
with penetrating nostalgia”. – Expert
“This dramatic story, familiar as the
ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and
Eurydice, begs to be staged in order to
recall its simple, but powerful maxims
– that the capacity to love must be
accompanied by the ability to forgive,
and the capacity to remember is as
important as the ability to forget”. –
Sergey Shickarev
Maria Galina
The Olympic Chase (aka CSE/2)
In the unlikely event that John Lindqvist had written a script for Ghostbusters and
set it in Soviet Russia, the result might have been this: CSE/2 – a suspenseful paranormal thriller in the period of Soviet Stagnation.
Eksmo, Russia
Paranormal thriller
2009, 250 pp
65 000 words
Awards:
e Marble Faun Award
2010
e Portal Prize 2010
e Silver Caduceus Award
2009
Rights sold:
France Agullo Editions
1979, a Russian provincial seaport town. Aer
failing her university entrance exams, the romantic 17-year-old goose-girl Rose gets a job as secretary in the port’s Center for Sanitation and Epidemiology. e office is called CSE/2, but Rose
can’t figure out how it differs from their neighbour’s office, CSE/1, which is in charge of inspection of cargo for parasites, viruses and alien bacteria. To Rose, people in both offices look just the
same and face the same problems, typical for
the time of Soviet Stagnation: shortages of
goods, endless lines in shops, depressingly unsettling living conditions, personal mishaps, and
a host of common minor conflicts at work.
Elena Sergeevna Petrishenko, head of the office,
is unhappy. A single mother with a rebellious
young girl (her spoilt child has grown up too fast,
it seems), Petrishenko also takes care of her bedridden mother suffering from Alzheimer’s. e
endless routine of red-tape at her job during the
day does little to brighten her life. Rosa’s coworkers include inspector Katyusha, a sugary
lady in her mid-40s who wears pink hand-knitted
sweaters, and Vasya, a university graduate in
ethnographic studies, another supervisor as well
as head of the CSE Communist party’s organization. Katyusha does not seem to be pressed for
time. e only thing that breaks her routine of
knitting and eating candy is fortune-telling, with
nearly all co-workers listed as her customers.
Vasya, too, resembles any other graduate – always ready to tease the romantic young girl
wearing green polish on her nails. Rose, however, feels strangely uncomfortable sitting next to
Katyusha, and in the end she has to wall herself
off from her colleague with an otherwise useless
bulky typewriter. And though Rose generally accepts Vasya’s jokes about her nail polish, she
hates to file his inspection reports, mottled with
cryptic letters.
A bitter and satirical account of the quotidian ex-
Galina creates a brilliant and original
world, peopled with vibrant, funny, and
recognizable characters. Chascor
The characters are sometimes absurd,
because they are ordinary people. But
laughing at them is distressing. CSE-2 is
not The Nightwatch or Ghostbusters; nor
is it a satire on the mores and conventions
of the late-Soviet Stagnation. It is a
story about relationships – and about
fate. About life, which is seldom happy.
Knizhnaya vitrina
istence of ordinary Soviet citizens then transmutes into a paranormal suspense thriller when
the police discover a mutilated corpse in the
city’s port, followed quickly by another corpse, at
the stadium. Both victims have had their legs disfigured, as if a maniac had roasted them in a fire.
e party and city officials accuse Petrishenko of
negligence, in this crucial time leading up to the
Olympic Games, and demand that their office detect and deactivate the monster. e specifics of
CSE/2 activity then become obvious – they battle with alien matter of non-organic origin – simply put, they battle with demons.
Petrishenko and Vasya succeed in classifying the
evil spirit on the loose in their town as a unique
threat: an ancient North American god of hunger
and the harvest. e spirit’s power grows with
each new victim, and this period of shortages,
when people are reduced to virtually hunting for
food, is perfect breeding ground for the ancient
god. While CSE/2 team waits for the arrival of
Vasya’s university professor, a powerful warlock
whose powers could match those of the monster, they can only stand by and watch as the
panic grows and the citizens storm and loot the
stores. When Rose senses a grim, baleful look
fixed on her back for the first time, she cannot
even imagine that this will plunge her into the
heart of dramatic events that far outstrip those
of her favorite adventure novels.
Galina’s writing resembles social realism, but her
fictional reality is both pessimistic and gruesome, with lavish doses of sarcasm and bitter
wit. e horror in Maria Galina’s story comes
from the anguish of quotidian life in the so-called
Epoch of Soviet Stagnation, rather than from the
surreal threat of menacing alien creatures. Unhappy and oen out of place, the characters in
the novel search for an impossible miracle in
their dull, daily routines, opening the gateway for
truly chthonic terror.
This “soft” fantasy about “mental
parasites” as yet unknown to science
is, perhaps, a unique attempt to come
to grips with what happened in the
Soviet Union during its last decade. The
demise of an empire, as we know from
history, is always accompanied by a rise in
paranormal powers, dances of death, and
the hunt for astral witches . . . NG ExLibris
Galina depicts an inhuman, demonic will
erupting through the mundane, personal
psychological motives of ordinary
people; and thus amplifies the sense of
total horror (as in Hitchcock films, where
the expectation is always more horrifying
that the actual event). Izvestia
Maria Galina, who commands equal
respect among lovers of fantasy and
faithful readers of “thick” literary
journals, has yet again confirmed her
status as a strong prose writer, balancing
on the boundary between fantasy and
phantasmagoria with the refinement of a
consummate tightrope-walker.
Piterbook
NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER PRICE
Andrei Rubanov
Andrei Rubanov, journalist by profession, became known to the Russian readership in 2006,
when in one of the major time-out magazines Afisha there appeared a review on his first selfpublished semi-autobiographical novel Do Time, Get Time, about self-perfection in prison. Translation rights to his debut were sold to UK, Poland, Bulgaria, France, Spain.
Within a week aer this review he received the offers from all the best Russian publishers. In two
months the novel was short-listed for the National Bestseller prize. His second novel – Great
Dream was published a year later, followed by nine published titles. Andrei lives in Moscow with
his family and runs his own small business.
“Rubanov in 2011 is what Aksenov was in 1961, Erofeev in 1971, Limonov in 1981, and Pelevin
in 1991 – smart, intelligent, with a keen ear and a healthy portion of impudence; a narcissist with
self-irony. is makes him no mere “big writer”, but a truly national treasure.” – Lev Danilkin for
Afisha
Andrei Rubanov is the only writer to make it onto the long list of the National Bestseller Prize
2011 with three titles.
Gods of Gods
With his tenth novel, the nationwide bestselling author Andrei Rubanov has craed
an intelligent helter-skelter thriller, a modern bio-punk version of H. G. Wells’ e Island of Doctor Moreau and Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes. Rubanov confronts
his characters with two competing ideologies in order to examine modern civilization as a battlefield between violence and love.
AST, Astrel, Russia
444pp
sci-fi
Awards:
Finalist of the Strugatsky
Fantasy Award 2012
Winner of the Golden Snail
Award
Rights sold:
Italy Meridiano Zero
A bio-engineered spacecra, the Biom, is transporting over 6,000 convicts to a planet where
the detainees will be serving their terms.
Among the convicts is Marat, a former pilot
charged with hijacking numerous spacecra,
and Zhilets (a nicknaame meaning the Living
One), a hardcore criminal sentenced for life. A
carefully premeditated plan of escape is implemented by Zhilets, with the aid of Marat’s
unique skills as a pilot. e two fugitives land
on a planet not listed in any space atlases, leaving the rest of the passengers floating in space,
confined within the Biom’s swily decomposing body. e landing is rough, and Zhilets, immobilized with a broken spine, cannot fully enjoy the promised land.
e Golden Planet is a true paradise: its tropical climate ensures the lavish growth of all
forms of life. Sweetness is, literally, in the air:
the water, earth, local plants, animals, even the
pagans’ sweat all taste and smell of chocolate
and caramel. Yet the local population does not
eagerly welcome the strangers. Marat’s first
encounter with the aboriginal people of the
planet challenges his deeply held conviction
that control and authority are only established
through love. e neolithic pagans interpret
sympathy as weakness; the unprepared Marat
has to abide by the commands of Zhilets and to
fight back. e first bloodshed proves productive, and Zhilets imposes his authority through
blunt algorithms of the divide and rule type.
Marat seeks a compromise between ruling as a
tyrant and retaining a humane sense of morality. In a few years, the handicapped old criminal
and the genius pilot, le with only wild animals
to tame, completely reconstruct the life on the
planet: treated as deities, they rule over dozens
of tribes in a swily erected City-on-the-Shore.
e visit of a female vagabond implodes into
their blissful routine. e woman takes them to
the legendary Uzur, a source of life energy. e
revived Zhilets launches a meaningless massacre as he explores the limits of what the Golden
Planet has to give, and only Marat can stand in
his way to ultimate power.
In Gods of Gods the fascinating inventiveness
of bio-engineered life forms, the intricate detail
of both the societies and habitats, and the
complex, believable characters, all amount to a
fabulous story. Rubanov is at his best here,
turning a sweeping interplanetary adventure
first into a drama of survival, then into a dely
craed farce, and eventually into a thoughtful
examination of human nature.
The Psycho Agent
Andrei Rubanov
e Psycho Agent, Andrei Rubanov’s breakthrough aer his debut prison novel
Do Time, Get Time, supersedes ready-to-hand comparisons with Houellebecq and
Wolfe and their social denouncements in this truly “big Russian novel” on love and
punishment.
AST, Astrel, Russia
2011, 352 pp
Rights sold:
France Flammarion/Ombres
Noires
Arabic Arabic Scientific
publishers
Awards:
Psycho Agent is a term coined by the author to
identify a person who engages in the psychological suppression of another person for his own
benefit: an “agent” or initiator of psychosis, a psychological “cannibal”. Such is Kirill Korablik, a.k.a
Cactus, a 40-year-old convicted murderer, released on parole aer only eighteen months of
his prison term, who bursts into the life of an ordinary young couple.
bery sets in motion the couple’s underlying problems. Mila does not want to stay in the defiled
place and moves out, while Boris refuses to take
action, instead sinking into a vodka-induced alcoholic haze. A growing number of unscrupulous
competitors, his mother’s progressive alcoholism, and even the wedding with Mila planned for
the coming summer all drag Boris down into a
deep depression.
Mila Bogdanova, 28, knows that she is smart and
beautiful, and is determined to get whatever she
desires. With solid professional credentials as a
top accountant in a small Moscow-based firm,
she has recently established having a happy personal life as a major priority. Her partner Boris
loves cars, as well as his own private business in
auto tuning – and, naturally, his girlfriend Mila.
Boris knows he can provide a good income for
the two of them even when business is bad: he
rents out a large flat in Moscow’s city center.
With their friends – Masha who lavishly spends
her days between partners and their wallets; and
Masha’s latest boyfriend Dima, a bright and wellto-do representative of the modern Moscow cultural beau monde – they merge and mingle, contributing to the formation of the new Russian
middle class. e “Buoyant Russians,” as the author dubs them, these young people are prepared
to live life to the hilt, though they can hardly imagine what this will mean for them.
Kirill, on the other hand, shows up shortly thereaer to report that the robber has been detained,
and that their belongings will soon be restored to
them. Kirill is benevolent, supportive and kind.
Mila, however, suspects that the gracious friend
who has suddenly taken control of their lives may
have secret motives. Mila resolves to get to know
Kirill better. eir swily developing relationship
escalates into a ruthless duel, and stakes are
much too high. Mila realizes that Kirill threatens
not only the peace and love of her family, but that
their very lives are in danger.
e two couples celebrate the New Year in a
country house. Kirill, a friend from Boris’s childhood years, pays a short visit with the purpose of
giving him an extravagant present: the photograph of an old Jaguar selling at bargain basement price, and the first installment for the deal.
On returning from the country aer their short
holiday break, the excited Boris and Mila discover
that someone has broken into their flat. e rob-
“e theme of the novel is biblical: “thou shalt not
covet thy neighbor’s wife”. e agent in the novel
is hardly Prince Charming. e narrative centers
on the battle between Beauty and the Beast; between a modern young woman who fights for
her happiness, and a man – a broken 40-year-old
fossil from the troubled Soviet epoch,” says Andrei Rubanov.
In this essentially pop-lit novel, Andrei Rubanov
masterfully draws a gallery of vivid, utterly believable characters, and keenly observes the slightest shis in dramatic psychological development. Rubanov’s blunt, somewhat publicist
narrative examines truly Dostoevskian questions
from a surprising new angle, with a fresh twist
that adds volume and topicality to the vast panoply of popular literature of the 21st century.
All That Glitters
A high-pitched criminal drama from the celebrated author of the prison novel that
stirred up the Russian literary scene, Do Time, Get Time.
e life of wine-merchant Matvei Matveev is no
less ordinary than the life of anyone who started
a business in early nineties in Russia. A safe flat, a
smart wife, and a nice job seem to be all he has,
and all he needs.
Eksmo, Russia, 2008, 384 p
Rights sold:
France Flammarion
Awards:
But the business is not doing as well as it seems;
in fact, it’s a mess. Matvei’s only employee is a
percussionist who plays in a band called Los
Anormales every Saturday. His ex-partner is a
banker, ultimate workaholic, exploiter, and a person heartless enough to refuse credit to Matvei
when he desperately needs it.
Still, Matvei’s life is no less ordinary than anyone’s. Until…he dies. Or at least that is what he
thinks has happened. Aer he disappears, his
wife Marina hires police captain Svinets to find
her husband. Meanwhile, Matvei, hidden in the
basement of a country house, is forced to recollect the episodes of his life that brought him to
this condition.
Masterfully, with wit and compassion, Rubanov
creates an entire gallery of psychological portraits of Russians in the 1990s. Bold entrepreneurs and their wives, corrupt politicians, drugusers, criminals and cops – their jealousies and
revenge are the pivot of this terrifying and convincing plot, in which there is death even aer
death.
Andrei Rubanov
Chlorophilia
People turning into vegetation is the premise of this penetrating dystopia from Andrei Rubanov
AST, Moscow
2009
320 pp
Rights sold
Germany Heyne
Spain Planeta/Minotauro
Serbia Solaris
Italy Meridiano Zero
Complete German
translation available
Moscow, the 22nd century. Saveliy Gertz works
as a journalist for e Very Best, a major Moscow
weekly. e magazine writes about those Russians who continue working while most of their
compatriots produce nothing, but mostly consume. Money is no longer a problem: Siberia is
rented out to the Chinese, and the Russians live
on the rent, cheering themselves up with the slogan “You don’t owe anyone anything”.
e strangest thing, however, is that Moscow is
overgrown with giant grass. Each stem is 300
meters long. It is impossible to cut it or to root it
out: it grows back instantaneously. What’s more,
the pulp of this grass is a powerful psychostimulant that causes pure joy, without, it seems, any
consequences. e drug is consumed in many
forms: the rich take it as a sublimed concentrate,
and the slum dwellers devour it raw. e grass
totally changes the metropolis’s social structure
and value system. e supreme value is the sun
that is blocked out by the rampant grass. One’s
social status depends on the floor where one
lives. e ninetieth floors are occupied by the
elite; the sixtieth by the middle class. e twentieth are true slums, and the people who live there
are called the pales for other kinds of values, the
pale grass-eaters don’t really have any. ey can
lie still all day long, basking in a feeling of pure joy
and watching e Neighbors, a popular reality
show. Consuming the grass is technically against
the law, but is not prosecuted... until it is discov-
ered that the seemingly harmless grass gradually
turns people into itself: into plants, that is. And
the first people to start literally striking root are
not the pale, as one might have expected, but the
upper-floor residents, who consume pure joy in
concentrated form.
Among them is the protagonist Saveliy Gertz,
and his pregnant wife Varvara. eir story evolves
against the chilling background of the unenviable
future of Moscow. When people begin to disappear, and the lamentable truth of their disappearance is revealed, the urban thriller morphs into a
western. Fearing that Varvara will give birth, not
to a healthy baby, but to a “little green man,” the
couple flees from Moscow to the countryside.
ere, in a special colony, doctors and volunteers
are trying to save the grass-eaters and prevent
them from turning into the plants. At the same
time, they must risk their lives trying to get along
with the savage locals. Saveliy, who now oen
wants to just stand still basking in the sun, faces
a difficult choice: to put down roots, to stop
thinking, to turn into a plant completely – or to
struggle to remain a human being.
Rubanov is one of the most fearless of contemporary Russian writers. An established master of
realistic fiction, mostly based on true stories, he
has created a penetrating anti-utopian vision that
spares no one. e reader is poised on the cusp
of curiosity and terror – so ingenious, and so terrifying at the same time, is this brave new world.
Earth of Life
In his sequel to the nationally acclaimed Chlorophilia Andrei Rubanov draws a bitter
and strikingly evocative panorama of the country’s life aer “the extermination” or
“rooting out”.
AST, Moscow
2010, 352 pp
It’s been only 20 years since the grass disappeared or was rooted out, as the authorities
claim, yet Denis Gertz never lived it differently.
e consumption-based economical system of
the country collapsed, the government moved to
a new capital built around lithium sources, and
Muscovites had to learn to survive on scarce allocated goods supplies. For the young man this
implies living in a small apartment on the floor up
to the twelh level (no water or electricity supply
provided above); doing public labour on the demolition of skyscrapers; stopping by a local hole for
some cheap vodka, tea and sourcrout; buying local food and clothing in a next-door supermarket;
and delivering goods to those few crazy or outcasts who choose to stay on the upper levels of
the city’s landmarks. Making 100 flights in one
“run” pays well – at least, Denis can provide for
his mother’s treatment of grass-eating post effects. New slogans of the Muscovites differ drastically from “You behold to no one” of the times of
prosperity: “Make things, not money” and “Spare
the savings”. ose few who spend time and
money in restaurants instead of contributing to
the society’s well-being, who choose delicatessen to simple nutritious products, or fashion
clothing to rough leather and cotton items from a
local store are disapprovingly called the decomposed. e latter however prefer to leave the city
and get to settle in the new capital – e New
Moscow – a city under the dome built in the heart
of Siberia. e dome protects the authority, business, science and cultural elite from any external
aggression – be it a climate change or unwanted
immigrants. e price for a comfortable, rich and
safe life is a personal transparency. All citizens
are being implanted personal ID files that are
open to public. Authorities can add anything into
a file, from information to feelings that range
from remorse, shame to euphoria or respect – a
vast field for manipulation.
Denis has other concerns than choosing e
New Moscow over his native city, a satiated yet
transparent life over challenging and simple lifestyle in the Old Moscow. His girlfriend le him for
his best friend and his mother gradually gives up
to her illness. Until one day together with his
friend he gets hold of what everybody believes to
be a myth – a grass seed. Now Denis Gertz
knows he can change it all. e seed has just to
be planted.
Anna Arutunyan
Anna Arutunyan’s work has appeared in USA Today, e Christian Science Monitor, e Nation,
Foreign Policy in Focus, and e Moscow News, where she is senior political reporter. She is author of e Media in Russia (McGraw-Hill, 2009), and is the co-author (with Vladimir Shlapentokh)
of the upcoming Freedom, Repression and Private Property in Russia (Cambridge University
Press, 2013). She has lectured on Russian power, politics and media at Tampere University in
Finland and at Michigan State University. A bilingual Russian-American, she was born in the Soviet Union but grew up and received her education in the United States. She has spent the last
decade studying Russian society.
Anna Arutunyan lives in Moscow with her husband and daughter.
The Putin Mystique
No mere biography, this timely, courageous and provocative book from a bilingual
Russian-American journalist, living in Russia for the past ten years, does not seek
to answer the o-examined question “Who is Vladimir Putin”, but rather provides
groundbreaking research into what in contemporary Russian culture, economy and
her people’s psyche has allowed Putin to become what he has become.
Non-fiction, Current Affairs,
Social History, 2012
ca 100 000 words
Original language: English
Foreign rights:
UK Skyscraper
US Interlink
Denmark Lindhardt og
Ringhof
Sweden Ordfront
Poland Zysk
Estonia Ajakirjade Kirjastus
Latvia Zvaigzne
Bulgaria Prozoretz
Czech Euromedia Group
Slovakia Ikar
Serbia Admiral Books
Hungary Europa
Portugal Bertrand Editora
Finland Atena
Lithuania Media Incognito
Romania Meteor
Why does Russia’s ruler call himself a president
but function increasingly like a Tsar? Why did a
“punk prayer” in a cathedral by four girls in colored
balaclavas set off a persecution campaign that
made Pussy Riot into a global name? What accounts for the revival of the Kremlin’s ties with the
Church, and what will happen in a potential revolt?
Anna Arutunyan, a senior political reporter at e
Moscow News sets forth an insightful and brave
journalistic investigation of the dynamics of the
relationships between the Russian people and
their ruler.
To understand Russia’s future, one must understand her past. e Putin Mystique depicts a neofeudal world where iPads, WTO membership, and
Brioni business suits conceal a power structure
straight out of the Middle Ages, where the Sovereign is both demonic and divine, where a man’s
riches are determined by his proximity to the
Kremlin, and where large swaths of the populace
resort to pseudo-masochism interrupted by
bouts of revolt. e key paradox uncovered in the
book is one that will astonish readers: supreme
power in the Kremlin is actually far weaker and
less vigorously exerted than many people hunger
for in modern Russia.
With an approach at once journalistic and personal, this book draws on over one hundred interviews, numerous case studies, and lively yet
scholarly examinations of existing writings to expose the primal origins of Russia’s de-facto patrimonial state and the social patterns that recreate
an autocrat. e Putin Mystique reveals the
shocking and previously unexamined fabric of life
that is at the base of Russian power - from the
impoverished worker who appeals directly to Putin for aid, to the businessmen, security officers
and officials in Putin’s oen dysfunctional government who look to their leader for instruction and
protection Spanning the last 12 years of Putin’s
rule, e Putin Mystique also includes first-hand
analysis of the latest movement, and takes an indepth look at the Pussy Riot affair and the recent
merging of Church and State in Russia.
Putin’s seeming omnipotence – and his return to
the Kremlin for a term that will last at least six
years - has confounded the West and much of the
world. Not a time-sensitive biography, the e Putin Mystique instead goes underneath the politics
to uncover how social, economic and psychological factors have molded Putin into a classical autocrat, transferring power to the leader and reviving the feudal relationships that have historically
governed Russia in the absence of the rule of law.
e Putin Mystique places the contemporary situation into the context of five centuries of autocratic power in Russia, revealing unexpected historical parallels which will surprise readers and
illuminate their understanding of what’s happening in Russia and why.
WINNER OF THE BIG BOOK AWARD &
BOOK OF THE YEAR 2010
Pavel Basinsky
Pavel Basinsky was born in 1961 in Frolovo, near Volgograd. He studied at Saratov University and
at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. A prolific journalist and author, Basinsky has
excelled at a number of genres, from scholarly monographs to experimental novels. Basinsky
holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, has sat on the jury of several major Russian literary prizes,
such as the Russian Booker, the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize and the Yasnaya Polyana Prize, and
is the Cultural Editor of Rossiiskaia Gazeta. He is married with two children and lives in Moscow.
Pavel Basinsky’s book Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise, came out in July 2010 and since then
has been reprinted 10 times. According to sales figures from some of the largest Russian bookshops Escape from Paradise ranks among the top ten most popular books of the year 2010.
Awards:
2010 – e Big Book Award
2010 – Book of the Year
2008 – Shortlisted for the Big Book Award
1998 – e AntiBooker Prize Ray of Light Award for literary criticism
Selected Bibliography:
2013 – Saint versus Leo
2011 – Passion According to Maksim. Gorky: Nine Days aer Death
2010 – Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise
2008 – Maxim Gorky: Myth and Biography
2008 – A Russian Romance or e Life and Adventures of John
Polovnik
2006 – A Humble Aristocrat
2006 – e Family as a Form of Mysticism
2004 – e Prisoner of Moscow
2002 – Writer Par Excellence
1998 – Russian Literature of the Late 19th and Early 20th centuries
and the First Emigration
1993 – emes and Characters
Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise
Basinsky’s book traces Tolstoy’s life aer his flight from Yasnaya Polyana, his childhood home and literary sanctuary, up until his death.
One hundred years ago, 82-year-old Count Leo
Tolstoy, Russia’s greatest literary genius,
shocked the world by suddenly abandoning his
vast ancestral estate, Yasnaya Polyana – and
his family. His disappearance on a freezing winter night immediately became an international
sensation.
AST, Russia
2010, 637 pp 155 500 w
Awards:
e Big Book Award 2010
Book of the Year 2010
Finalist of the Big Book
Award 2008
e AntiBooker Prize 1998
Foreign Rights:
UK, US Glagoslav
Germany Projekt Verlag
Brazil Laya
Portugal Laya
Bulgaria Riva
Latvia Kontinent
Israel Schocken
Italy Castelvecchi
Romania Editura Humanitas
Serbia Russika
Poland Margynesi
Slovenia Beletrina
Arabic Yola
Armenia Vogi Nairi
Lithuania Media Incognito
During Tolstoy’s last days in Astapovo in November 1910 he was quickly surrounded by a
camp of journalists and devotees, living in tents,
with daily reports about his state of health sent
to the international press via an especially installed telegraph line, with added commentaries and interviews with the most prominent
Russian writers, bishops, governors, etc. us,
what the 82-year-old man had intended as the
start of his new life as a wandering ascetic became a world media circus involving Russia’s
most powerful forces: the clergy, the secret police and the Supreme State Authority, headed
by Tsar Nicholas and Stolypin.
Since then, the circumstances surrounding his
departure and the death of the man called the
Greatest Writer of All Time gave rise to much
speculation...
Escape from Paradise presents not just a new
version of Tolstoy’s secret flight from Yasnaya
Polyana and his sudden death, but a vivid and
in-depth reconstruction, based on archival and
documentary evidence. We follow Tolstoy’s escape step by step, learning the reasons behind
his tragic family situation and the secrets surrounding the signing of his will. ese events are
placed in the context of Tolstoy’s fascinating life
story, key moments from which are reconstructed and explored.
What was the real reason behind Tolstoy’s flight
from Yasnaya Polyana? Was it “spiritual heroism”, a sign of weakness or just plain panic and
fear of something – or someone…? Was the
flight connected to Tolstoy’s last will, signed by
Tolstoy in the strictest secrecy in the woods
near the village of Grumont?
To answer these and many other questions the
author investigated all the available literature on
the subject including the archives of the Tolstoy
Estate Museum at Yasnaya Polyana. e book
is richly illustrated with rare photographs from
these archives.
10 print runs within a year, over 60 000 copies sold
Bestseller: top 10 bestselling books of the year
English, Polish samples are available
Complete English, German & Portuguese translations are available
Pavel Basinsky
Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise
Selected reviews
“Pavel Basinsky has written an absolute
bestseller. His well-researched tale of
Tolstoy’s escape is a road story, a thriller
and a psychological drama all in one”. –
Maya Kucherskaya, Vedomosti
“Basinsky performed no less than a
miracle in managing to find the delicate balance between Tolstoy the writer
and Tolstoy the man. In many ways this
could be attributed to the cinematic approach of the book, the skillful use of
flashbacks tracing his life back from the
fateful flight from home, to find the answer to the question: Who was that man
who died in Astapovo?” – Alexander
Gavrilov, Snob
“This new book about the man often referred to as the genius of Russian literature is a good match to the genius’ novels themselves. Skillfully and thoroughly,
the author weaves the fabric of his investigative novel – which makes you hold
your breath like a true thriller would – in
an attempt to explain the strange fact
that up until this day remains a mystery – Tolstoy’s escape from home right
before his death. This is not a reference
book of facts and figures, but an exciting
novel with one of the most contradictory thinkers of our times as the main character. Having researched tons of sources – letters, memoirs, diaries of Tolstoy
and his family, servants, followers and
close friends – Basinsky creates a seamless mosaic so perfect you couldn’t find
a single fault with a magnifying glass”. –
Vladimir Pankratov, Afisha
“This is a detailed chronicle of the life
of Tolstoy, researched and investigated
from every possible angle. It’s not just
a story of an eccentric death but a fullfledged biography told with a particular
incident of Tolstoy’s life – his flight from
home – as a starting point in a series of
detailed flashbacks. It gives an insight
into many aspects of Tolstoy’s life: His
relationship with the church, with people in his household, dependents and
frequent guests, and his social network
in the last years of his life. The financial
side of life. The history of his marriage…
The author has a good “Tolstoy sense”,
his interpretation of the source is deep
and credible”. – Lev Danilkin, Afisha
WINNER OF PROSVETITEL (ENLIGHTEMENT) AWARD
Victor Sonkin
Victor Sonkin received his Ph.D. in Western and Slavic literature from Moscow State University.
He spent several years working for the United Nations in the Netherlands. For over five years, he
has worked as a columnist for e Moscow Times, Russia’s largest English-language publication.
Currently, Victor contributes articles to several major magazines and newspapers, in both Russian and English (including e Times Literary Supplement), and works as freelance translator.
Victor Sonkin has given lectures on various cultural and linguistic issues in major universities in
Russia, UK, France, Slovenia and Norway. For almost ten years, he has been teaching (jointly with
Dr. Alexandra Borisenko) a course in cultural history, theory and practice at Moscow State University. It is one of the most popular practical seminars at the Literature department.
As a result of this work, several books were published, some of them critically acclaimed and successful with the readers. One of the
projects, an anthology of Victorian crime fiction Not Just Holmes, was a major commercial success and received the prestigious
‘Book of the Year’ award of the Federal Press and Mass Communications Agency.
Victor’s achievements have several times been acknowledged by various national and international fellowships, including Research
Support Scheme (a George Soros program), Presidential Award for Young Scholars, fellowships of the Government of Slovenia, Fellowship of Mikhail Gasparov academic school and others. Victor was more than once nominated as the best Russian cultural columnist on the Internet.
“Here Was Rome: A Walk rough the Ancient City” is a result of many years of research and fascination with the Classical world.
In November 2013, “Here Was Rome” was awarded the Prosvetitel (Enlightenment) award, Russia’s foremost award for nonfiction.
Here Was Rome - A Walk Through the Ancient
City
e Romans continue to fascinate us. ere is hardly an aspect of modern Western life which does not date back to them. Our legal systems, armies, communications, education, political parties, administration, corruption and pop culture are all
firmly rooted in Roman tradition. Any latter-day empire, understood broadly as a
large multinational country, whether crumbled or crumbling (as the British Empire
or the Soviet Union) or standing firmly (as the United States) inevitably looks in
Rome’s distant mirror, trying to discern its own features.
Here Was Rome
A Walk rough the
Ancient City
Corpus/Astrel, Moscow
2012, 608 pp, memoir
Rights sold:
World English Skyscraper
Awards:
Prosvetitel (Enlightenment)
prize 2013
An “archaeological tourist” has become a reality of the travel business. Existing equivalents
of the Grand Tour of the 18th and 19th centuries and guidebooks focusing on antiquities are
there to support this phenomenon. Oen, however, the details obscure the whole, and the
story of Pax Romana – the Roman world – submerges under the descriptions of sites and ruins.
e purpose of this book is to provide, for the
first time in many years, a coherent story behind the sites, to lead the reader on a journey
through the turbulent history of the Roman
state from its humble beginnings on the Palatine hill to the maximum extent of its power in
the 1st-2nd centuries AD, when almost the
whole world known to the Romans was Roman. Firmly rooted in the topographic and architectural realities of today, the book will
strive to give the sites a meaning, to connect
them with the people who lived, fought and
loved there two thousand years ago.
e estimated length of the book is 80,000
words. e book will feature a comprehensive
bibliography for those wishing to learn more
about ancient Rome or its specific sites, with
short comments about most of the books.
e book will be bought and read by anyone
with an interest in ancient history and/or engaged in “cultural travel.” Rome is visited annually by 7 to 10 million tourists, firmly occupying
the third place among European cities; much of
its appeal stems from the very fact of the city’s
antiquity.
e book, though well-researched and rooted
in classical sources and current scholarship, is
intended for the general reader. It will not follow the “infotainment” path, when the knowledge processed for easy digestion is extremely
superficial, but it will not assume any thorough
knowledge of Classical culture in the reader either, and will strive to introduce the concepts
of the Roman world in a logical and comprehensive manner.
MAGIC STORYTELLER
Sveta Dorosheva
Sveta Dorosheva is no less than a magician. A 34-year old author and illustrator, linguist
and designer, copyrighter and art director, she manages to create stories where words and
images so magically intertwine they create a whole new universe, stories so unique they
turn the world on its head and Sveta lives in Israel with her husband and two children.
Svetlana’s illustrator portfolio can be found here: www.behance.net/lattona
Selected Bibliography:
2011 e Nenuphar Book
2009 Mummy Hurries Home
The Nenuphar Book
e Nenuphar Book is a book about people written by fairies, gnomes, elves and other fairy-tale
creatures. It was found in a water lily under mysterious circumstances (hence the name). e
whole book is a collection of evidence by fairy
creatures proving that people exist.
Atticus, Russia
2014
21 x 24 cm, full color
210 pp
Rights sold:
USA Dega Press
Romania Baroque Books
It’s a book about people and human world, as
seen through the eyes of fairy-tale creatures.
ey don’t generally believe in people, but
some have travelled to our world in various
mysterious ways. Such travelers collected evidence and observations about people in this
book. It’s an assortment of drawings, letters,
stories, diaries and other stuff about people,
written and drawn by fairies, elves, gnomes
and other fairy personalities. ese observations may be perplexing, funny and sometimes
absurd, but they all present a surprised look at
the things that we, people, take for granted.
Each chapter is written by a different creature – elf, fairy, gnome, ogre, giant, witch, etc. It
Selected reviews
Ukraine-born artist Sveta Dorosheva has
been dedicated to creating some of the
most beautiful book illustrations I have
ever laid eyes on. – Andreea Saioc, The
Global Panorama
The Nenuphar Book, one of Dorosheva’s
many graphic jewels, is a book about a
world in reverse, where humans are Todorov’s so-called paper beings, while
fairytale creatures shiver under their
blankets in fear of our mysterious ways.
Starting as a completely different project, that is a catalogue of fairies, it came
to be an entire chronicle on humans as
seen by fairytale creatures. The book
looks inquisitively at the abstract mech-
comprises such topics as human anatomy,
types and origin of people, magic human things
and dwellings, language, beliefs, rituals, work,
music, dance, and many more. Some observations are odd, some awfully inaccurate, some plain funny, but they all weave together into a
tongue-in-the-cheek playful picture of a world
so incredibly odd to an outsider, that it’s no
wonder fairy creatures can’t believe in it!
‘is is a series of book illustrations that
presents an attempt of fairy-tale creatures
(who don’t believe in people) to understand
what is a man, based on testimonials of people
themselves (quotes by famous people on the
nature of man). e resulting impression is
rather perplexing’.
With her imaginative illustrations, Sveta is
overlapping philosophy and literature, creating
her own fictional narrative in the form of fairy
tale, whilst actually defining many truths about
human nature.
anisms of love and hate and money, our
daily habits and their rationale, if any,
and our origins. The lacunae are of course
filled with fantasy – since seen from afar,
humans seem powerful beyond measure
and their lives unknowable. – Andreea
Saioc, The Global Panorama
Sveta Dorosheva‘s fantastical art could
be compared to a brilliant dream collaboration among noted artists, for
whom the goal is a visionary book of
enchanted tales. Imagine an artistic hybrid comprised of the intricately-lined
illustrations of Harry Clarke or Aubrey
Beardsley, the luxurious art deco magnificence of Romain de Tirtoff (Erté)
fashion plates, and the beautiful-on-the-
verge-of-grotesque visages drawn by the
enigmatic Alastair. But! In this imaginary
scenario, the artists realize there is something… some je ne sais quois… missing
from their efforts. They entice illustrator
Sveta Dorosheva to join their endeavors:
she flits in, and with a mischievous smile
and a gleam of amusement in her eye, announces “yes, yes, this is all very beautiful… but let’s make it FUN! - Coilhouse
Her illustrations take me back to childhood being in love with fairytales and
knowing there was infinite possibility for
imagination in the world ahead. – Cupcake Punk

Rights Catalogue Fall 2015

Transcription

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