ELKOST International literary agency - Presentation of the Italian edition of Daniel Stein, Translator by Ludmila Ulitskaya in Milan, 23/02/2010

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Chekhov's Poetics (1971), a book of literary studies by Alexander Chudakov

Rights sold: World English rights - Ardis (reverted)

Originally published in Moscow in 1971, Chekhov's Poetics remains the best single-volume study devoted to Chekhov. In fact, anyone who attempts to stage or study Chekhov seriously must consult Cudakov—and the sooner the better.

Tightly and lucidly written, this relatively slender volume constitutes a gold mine of important facts, judicious commentaries, and sober judgments about Chekhov’s oeuvre—all substantiated by prodigious citations form the writer's work. Although demonstrating an impressive mastery of Russian and Western Chekhov scholarship, and occasionally quoting Chekhov’s letters, Chudakov depends exclusively on the stories and plays themselves to advance his persuasive arguments. We have here a close reading of Chekhov, meticulous in its detail but always cognizant of the larger issues which Chekhov’s complex, often elusive writing raises. The book is divided into two parts of almost equal length and moves from structure to idea in Chekhov. Part One (“Narrative Structure“) deals largely with Chekhov's use of the narrator, challenging the view that the writer's work shows little or no significant evolution. The frequently quantitative approach to Chekhov’s texts makes for some slow reading at first, but the results are highly rewarding—as witnessed by Cudakov’s marvelous extended analyses of “The Grasshopper” and “The Steppe." Part Two (“The Tangible World") concentrates on Chekhov's treatment of external reality, his major devices, and the role of ideas in his work. This section, which (quite uniquely) sees Chekhov “whole," i.e. as both prosaist and dramatist, offers the most compelling explanation available of so-called Chekhovian “disconnectedness," and insightfully demonstrates how Chekhov’s view of the individual differs radically from that offered by the literary tradition of Russia's major realists. Through frequent references to works by Turgenev. Goniarov, Dostoevskij, and Tolstoj, Cudakov builds up to one of his major conclusions about Cexov’s aesthetic system, namely that “(existence) is irrational and chaotic, its meaning and purposes are unknown and not subordinate to a visible idea. The nearer the created world is to that natural existence with all its chaotic, senseless and incidental forms, the more that world approaches absolute adogmatic reality. This is precisely the world of Chekhov.”

Soviet Education, a novel by Olga Medvedkova

Rights sold: France - Alain Baudry & Cie Editeur, Spain - Acantilado

Prix Révélation de la Société des gens de lettres (2014, France)

Summer 1980: Moscow prepares for the Olympics at great risk, in the midst of the war in Afghanistan. The city is closed to non-residents, who in any case are abandoning it. Liza is one of them. An adolescent in search of her
identity, she has gone with her mother to a village she has never been to, but where her mother is very well known. And for good reason: the village bears her name. The mansion, an imposing but dilapidated Italianate building,
belonged to her ancestors, Russian princes close to the tsar. As for Liza, she bears the name of her father: Klein. A father who lives in America and the mere mention of whom is all but forbidden. Liza understands only that she has
a German name, and that she is the descendant, on her father’s side, of Joseph Klein, the Russian translator of Goethe.

Here, suddenly, are too many identities, whose accumulating questions go unanswered. Jewish, aristocratic, Soviet, intellectual – her family is a tissue of contradictions. To crown it all, she is troubled by David, her mother’s friend,
whose house they are living in, and who as she quickly realizes is of Jewish origin, a pillager of memories in the ancestral mansion, an accomplice of the village folk, a disillusioned artist declared a “social parasite” by the
authorities, who collaborates with a film crew that finances its perfectly official films by trafficking in icons...

Medvedkova's novel ideally combines a number of themes and elements which are quite typical for any novel where action is set in Russia, but their mixture produces an unexpected effect. Its protagonist a 15-year-old anorexic girl, a wonder-kid passing throughout a difficult stage of growing up and maturing, confronting the outside world and - especially - her authoritarian mother who herself has many skeletons in her closet.

The novel features the "ordinary family of Soviet intellectuals". Its narrative gains momentum gradually, and that subtly reflects the state of the soul and consciousness of the main character, its internal development: from slow and sleepy, to feverishly sharp, dizzy fast. Up to the very end of the book, Lisa (and the reader) doesn't see the full picture.

The novel is beautifully written, very dynamic and elegant. It's a concentrate of all Russian and Soviet just in the form that Western readership is interested to get. Aristocratic roots of Liza's family, dissidents, Soviet cultural elite, intelligentsia, etc. - in fact, the book provides a descriptive account of formation, way of thinking and self-perception of the modern Russian intellectuals, all these people who now got to play an important role in world science, culture,
politics, and economy.

The book is originally written in French and has around 220 pages.