Featured titles
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The Colonel Myasoedov Affair, a novel by Józef Mackiewicz
Original Polish title: SPRAWA PUŁKOWNIKA MIASOJEDOWA
Rights status: available for all languages less Polish and French.
Published by: France - NOIR SUR BLANC, Polish - Świderski, Wydawnictwo Klubów Mysli Robotniczej "Baza", Kontra; German - J. Pfeiffer; Spanish - Luis de Carait
The plot of The Colonel Myasoyedov Affair (1962) concerns the fate of Colonel Myasoyedov, a rather ordinary employee of the Russian state and private entrepreneur, who gets caught up in a complex web of events involving Russian-German spying activities, internecine battles between factions within the Okhrana (Russian secret police), and escalating tension between Germany and Russia as they work up towards the Great War. Eventually, Myasoyedov is accused of spying – via rumour, innuendo and disinformation – and is sentenced to death, partly on anti-Semitic grounds: he has been involved with a Jewish company which does shipping business between Germany and Russia, and has been protected by an aristocratic patron within the intelligence services, who is an anti-anti-Semite. (One of the more fascinating scenes in the novel is a description of a pogrom in Kiev in 1905, and all the different interests involved in stoking it, and stopping its course.) Once Myasoyedov is executed (in 1915), the novel's point of view shifts to his widow, Clara, who finds herself pursued by the rumours about her husband all the way up to WWII, and who eventually decides to flee the Soviet sphere with her second husband, and ends up witnessing the 1945 firebombing of Dresden. It is a kind of Russian "Dreyfuss affair", but much more interesting and with a larger historical panorama.
"Mackiewicz is a first-rate writer, with a wonderful sense of character, a gift for dialogue, and a strong narrative instinct. ... He has a deeply informed historical intelligence, and a powerful sense of the hidden connections between causes of events, and their sometimes much later consequences. The writing is marked by an appealing naturalness, as it moves from scenes of personal life and relationships, and the broader political and historical panorama." -- Eva Hoffman, the author of Lost in Translation
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A TRACE IN THE FOOTPRINT, a novel by Vladimir Sharov
Rights sold: Russia - OLMA, ARSIS BOOKS, World Arabic - DREAMBOOK
A Trace in the Footprint is a family saga set in twentieth century Russia. The plot follows a character named Fyodor who begins to research the genealogy of his adoptive father, Golosov. This leads to the unraveling of a whole century of family history beginning with his great-grandfather. Fyodor soon discovers that his family’s history is inextricably linked to that of the Socialist Revolutionaries, the political party that would eventually split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The novel depicts the changes in Fyodor’s family after being forced to adapt to the political and social changes that took place after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Critically, the novel was praised for its classical narration reminiscent of Tolstoy’s realism.
Once published in hard copy in 1992, the book sold over 25,000 copies in Russia.
Sharov’s A Trace in the Footprint has been compared by critics to the 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Marquez. Where Sharov’s story follows a Russian family, Marquez’s novel tells a multigenerational story of the Buendia family from Colombia. Similarly to Sharov, Marquez’s story plunges into the true events that occurred but places a fictional family at the forefront. The result of the novels is the same, although fictional, the novels recreate the emotions felt in times of historical turmoil. Both stories accurately depict a family struggling to keep up with the socio-political changes that happen around them.
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