Featured titles
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Kira Georgievna, a novel by Victor Nekrasov (1961)
Published by: Croatia - Svjetlost (1963); Czech Republic - SNKLU (1962); Denmark - Kbh (1962); France - Seuil (1963); Germany - Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (1962), Ullstein Verlag (1981); Italy - Einaudi (1961); Israel - משרד הבטחון; Poland - Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy (1961); Slovakia - Slovenské vydavatelstvo krásnej literatúry (1962); Spain - Editorial Mateu (1962); UK - Cresset Press (1963), Cambridge University Press (1967); USA - Pantheon Books (1962),
Set in 1960's Russia, the novel tells the story of Kira Georgievna, a middle-aged successful sculptor, passively married to Nikolai, a much older painter. Each completely engrossed in their work, they become entirely emotionally detached from one another. At this point we meet Vadim, the man Kira was engaged to marry twenty-five years earlier. Their plan was destroyed upon Vadim's arrest by the Solviet police, which earned him a twenty-year sentence in Siberia. Now married with a five-year-old son, his curiosity leads him back to Kira. They fall in love all over again and plan to start a new life, but complications naturally arise when they realize the sacrifices that must be made in order to be together.
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BEFORE AND DURING, a novel by Vladimir Sharov
Rights sold: China - PEKING UNIVERSITY PRESS, France - PHÉBUS, Italy - VOLAND, Serbia - UTOPIA, World English - DEDALUS
Set in a psychiatric clinic in Moscow in the long decades of late-Soviet stagnation, Before and During sweeps the reader away from its dismal surroundings on a series of fantastical excursions into the Russian past. The novel invokes real historical events and people (Tolstoy, Madame de Staël, Saint John of Kronstadt, Alexander Scriabin, and Stalin, among others), swirling them into a phantasmagoric alternative chronology. Stories germinate within other stories, unfolding in astonishing variations.
We meet Leo Tolstoy’s twin brother, eaten by the great writer in his mother’s womb, only to be born as Tolstoy’s ‘son’; the philosopher-hermit Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed that the common task of humanity was the physical resurrection of their ancestors; a self-replicating Madame de Staël who, during her second life, is carried through plague-ridden Russia in a glass palanquin and becomes Fyodorov’s lover; and the composer Alexander Scriabin, who preaches to Lenin on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Out of these intoxicating, darkly comic fantasies – all described in a serious, steady voice – Sharov seeks to retrieve the hidden connections and hidden strivings of the Russian past, its wild, lustful quest for justice, salvation and God.
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