Featured titles
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Yakov's Ladder, a novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2015)
2016 Big Book Award (3rd place) and Reader’s Choice Award
German rights are handled by Christina Links:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Rights sold: Azerbaijan - TEAS, Brazil - Editora Estação Liberdade, China - People's Literature, Croatia - FRAKTURA, Czech Republic - PASEKA, France - GALLIMARD, Georgia - Palitra L, Italy - LA NAVE DI TESEO, Iran - HOUPAA, Germany - HANSER, Hungary - MAGVETO, Poland - WYDAWNICTWO LITERACKIE, Romania - HUMANITAS FICTION, Russia - AST, Serbia - ARHIPELAG, Slovakia - SLOVART, Sweden - ERSATZ, Ukraine - BookChef, World English - FSG
At first glance, Yacov’s Ladder perfectly embodies the generic definition of a “family saga.” The story of several generations of Osetskys, who were originally from Kiev and then transplanted to Moscow, spans an entire century, from 1911 to 2011. The family saga is, however, no more than a shell, a shapely vessel chosen by the author in her search for answers to the questions posed inexorably and unrelentingly by literature and philosophy since the beginning of human existence: to what degree is the human individual free or unfree? How do circumstances, DNA, or history combine to determine or condition the individual personality?
The novel revolves around two axes, Nora and her grandfather, Yakov Osetsky. Nora and Yakov have seen each other only once, in the mid-1950s, when Nora was just a child, and Yakov’s life was already nearing its end. The encounter was no more than a fleeting episode for both of them. A true meeting of minds and souls occurred only much later, in 2011, when Nora had already emerged from the commotion and tumult of everyday existence and the course of her life was winding down, and she read the diaries of her grandfather, as well as his family correspondence (which covered many decades), and the dossier of Yakov Osetsky from the KGB archives.
From the first page, the reader is thrust headlong into the masterfully depicted world of the main character, Nora Osetsky. Nearly all the people who play an important role in her life appear in the narrative in quick succession: her son Yorik, theater director Tengiz Kuziani, her mother Amalia, her father Henrik, her grandmother Marusya, and an “occasional” husband Victor. The people are enmeshed in themes and objects: theater, the career of a set designer, books, sugar tongs, an old blouse trimmed with an ancient Egyptian motif, and an osier chest holding the family archives.
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Non-Memoirs by Yuri Lotman
Rights sold: World English - Dalkey Archive Press, Italy – INTERLINEA, Spain – GRANADA UNIVERSITY PRESS, Turkey - ALFA
One afternoon in December 1992, in Tartu, Estonia, Yuri Lotman reluctantly sat down to dictate his memoirs to Elena Pogosian, his assistant, over a pot of tea. Before his wife, Zara Mints, died in 1990, he had promised her that he would write the story of his life, and it was in memory of her that he embarked on a project he found disagreeable. This December afternoon was the first of twelve dictation sessions during which the initial draft of Non-Memoirs was created between them. The sessions were spread out over that winter and into the spring of 1993—the last spring of Lotman’s life. He could no longer write himself, due to a series of debilitating strokes and the weakness brought on by kidney cancer, and so had grown accustomed to the process of dictation and transcription by means of which he produced Non-Memoirs and his final theoretical works, the largest of which is a collection of essays called Culture and Explosion.
In its published form, Non-Memoirs is divided into seven sections of varying length. The five shorter sections concern themselves with a single anecdote or theme (lice on the front, an encounter with a hare, a “totally Bulgakovian” episode, a visit from the KGB, Tartu School politics); the two longer sections provide the narrative backbone of the memoirs, tending to treat the passage of time, rather than a single event (school and frontline life, the end of the war and postwar university life).
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