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Eisen, a novel by Guzel Yakhina (2025)
Rights sold: Azerbaijan - QANUN, Croatia - HENA, Czech Republic - PROSTOR, Estonia – TANAPAEV, France - NOIR SUR BLANC, Germany - KANON VERLAG, Hungary - HELICON, Italy - E/O, Netherlands - QUERIDO, Poland - NOIR SUR BLANC, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - LAGUNA, Spain - ACANTILADO, Turkey - ALFA, World English - EUROPA EDITIONS UK/USA, World Arabic - RASHM
Sergei Eisenstein remains among the most famous and revered figures in the history of world cinema. His masterpieces Battleship Potemkin, October, ¡Que viva México!, Ivan the Terrible, and the destroyed Bezhin Meadow, have been vigorously studied and became – along with most of Eisenstein’s theoretical writings – an integral part of the programs of all film schools. Naturally, anyone who pretends being a cinema connoisseur has at least once seen one or two of Eisenstein’s movies.
Eisenstein, who was a famous movie director and theorist, wrote a lot about the art of cinema, about himself and his contemporaries, and left after himself a huge archive of drawings and diaries, thus reliably fixing his place in history. However, Sergei Eisenstein has never been a main hero of any work of literary fiction. Guzel Yakhina's novel is the first literary biography of the legendary director whom his closest friends nicknamed Eisen.
Yakhina tells Eisenstein's personal story through the process of making films, from the first to the last; the movements of his artistic soul, the conflicts and other circumstances that shaped Eisen's personality are examined through the prism of the his main passion, and masterfully woven into a vivid fabric of artistic text.
Eisenstein's creative process is the nerve of her narrative covering his entire life against the backdrop of wars and revolutions that shook the world in the first half of the 20 century. The people surrounding Eisen – his family, colleagues, women, bosses, actors, – are all involved in his mono-performance. Yakhina’s protagonist seeks and finds ways to always remain in the center of attention, to evoke strong feelings he so desperately needs; he manipulates the emotions of both his loved ones, and of the audience.
A literary biography created by Yakhina not only explores the nature of Eisenstein’s personality and genius. By bravely expanding the boundaries of her narrative, she analyzes the nature of art in a totalitarian state. Eisenstein reaches the pinnacle of self-expression by subjugating History, which is exactly what the young Soviet state demanded: to give the masses a new History that would replace the old, outdated one. Having once discovered the main secret of cinema and other visual arts, – “people believe what we show on the screen, so what we show eventually converts into the truth”, – Eisen develops and perfections his own artistic method consisting in triggering a strong emotional response in his viewers, and ingeniously realizes the concept of art under totalitarianism, replacing critical perception of reality by an invented, cinematic reality. According to Yakhina, the price paid by Sergei Eisenstein for this secret knowledge, for the power he gained over the audience, and for resulting world fame is quite similar to that of Dr. Faustus's.
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Savely's Days, a novel by Grigory Sluzhitel
Winner of the 2020 Moscow Art Prize (Russia)
Winner of the 2019 Big Book Award (Russia)Rights sold: Bulgaria - GNEZDOTO, China (simplified Chinese) - GINKGO, Estonia - TANAPAEV, France - SYRTES, Hungary - TERICUM, Italy - FRANCESCO BRIOSCHI EDITORE, Latvia - JANIS ROZES, Lithuania - ALMA LITTERA, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - LOGOS
Grigory Sluzhitel’s Savely’s Days, narrated by a male cat named Savely who was likely named for a brand of a cottage cheese, is so affecting and charming that it makes even experienced reader smile, laugh, and even sob. Savely’s story isn’t just a chronicle of a cat’s life, it’s also a love letter to Moscow, and a bittersweet story of kinship, friendship, and separations.
As the novel’s title indicates, Savely, a very literate and literary cat, tells his life story, beginning with memories from the womb, birth, and early life in a Chiquita banana box. Savely’s childhood is pretty happy, featuring food from benefactors, regular visits to see his aunt (who lives in a front-loading washing machine), and good relationships with his sisters and mother. His upbringing is solid: his mother tells him that cats don’t really have nine lives so there’s no sense in taking chances by walking in front of motorized transportation. Savely loses touch with his family after a well-meaning human takes him in. He’s not particularly happy in his new life despite nice possessions like a laser mouse, scratchers, and rubber balls, not to mention a Sunday ritual of climbing into a tea pot. He ends up bolting on the way to a vet visit (he’s already been neutered), leaving Vitya, a bookish teenager who’s something of an outcast, catless.
Savely cycles through quite a few lives in the book, serving as a rat catcher at the Tretyakov Gallery and having to co-habit, albeit briefly, with a parrot named Iggy, a situation not fated to end well. Then he's hosted by a young Kirgiz man who rescues Savely after he’s attacked and left badly injured. After Askar is fired from his job at Gorky Park he finds work as a bicycle deliveryman and brings Savely with him. They even deliver food to a theater backstage in a scene that seems to include Sluzhitel in a cameo appearance.
Savely wants to see the world (or at least Moscow) and even gives the impression of being something of an existentialist with a phobia for commitment, too. At least, that is, until he meets a beautiful young cat, in some of the book’s nicest passages, and starts a happy cat-family life in a doghouse with his love and a dog
In his introduction to Savely’s Days, Eugene Vodolazkin says that Sluzhitel draws on his acting skills and becomes a full-fledged cat in the novel. Indeed, Sluzhitel is so good at writing about a cat’s life that at certain point Savely’s descriptions of his own life are more convincing than his passages about his humans’ backstories. The humans’ stories feel like slivers of a portrait of Moscow in the twenty-first century, but they only really come alive when Savely is interacting with his people in some way, by climbing into the teapot, observing Vitya’s grandmother, or making sushi deliveries. Or sitting inside someone’s coat on a park bench during a time of mourning.
Somehow this doesn’t just feel like a matter of Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, something else Vodolazkin mentions in his introduction. It feels as if Sluzhitel’ isn’t just showing the world from a novel perspective. He’s an actor who’s an author (and an author who’s an actor) and channels his inner catness to thoroughly inhabit a character who’s not even of his own species. In doing so, he manages to find an internal logic for his text that makes the feline perspective feel perfectly natural, as if it’s not just a literary device. Savely may be a cat but he can tell a story – an exceedingly rare quality these days – at least as well as he can chase his tail.
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