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Zwinger, a novel by Elena Kostioukovitch (2013)
Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Italy - BOMPIANI (RCS LIBRI), Russia - CORPUS BOOKS (AST), Serbia - RUSSICA, Ukraine - FOLIO
Elena Kostioukovitch´s Zwinger blends together the genres of historical novel and thriller, with a lively and ironic style. In the frame of a fictional detective story, the book investigates deeply into the real mysteries of the Twentieth century history through precious documents and direct testimonies of the author.
«Just before Victor Zieman was faxed the severed head of his assistant Mireille, he was sitting in the Iroha restaurant in Frankfurt with Behr, eating tempura. It was Wednesday. All this mayhem had started on the Saturday before the Book Fair, in Victor’s Milan apartment where everything looked exactly the same as it always did.»
Seven wild days in the life of Zwinger's main character, Victor Sieman, twist together into a tight knot of quest and adventure, where the final, true goal turns out to be finding oneself. The road home and the road to oneself are a classic plot, and the Odysseus-Ulysses of 2005 is a contemporary European intellectual weighted down by knowledge, history, and the baggage of our entire centuries-old culture.
Victor Sieman works for a book publisher, specializing in books on historical archives. As he is preparing to leave for the 2005 Frankfurt Book Fair, he gets a strange phone call. Someone is offering to sell him family documents related to his grandfather's wartime past. His grandfather (modelled on the author's grandfather, Leonid Volynsky) was in Dresden in the first seven days of May 1945, leading the search for paintings from the Dresden Art Museum hidden by the Nazis – and almost paid for it with his freedom and his life.
Now Victor has only seven days to recover his family's papers and uncover details from his family's past – his mother's death, his mysterious father – while keeping up with his important assignment, and searching for the French girl Mireille, who has possibly gotten entangled in a web of secrets, intrigues, threats and cruelty. And what if Mireille is just a tool of her devious puppetmasters?
Rare documents, discoveries and revelations await our hero at every turn – a roller coaster ride through a spy novel together with a criminal thriller, wartime drama, professional journalism (with an insider's knowledge of the book business), and autobiography. The wartime events are meticulously researched and based on the author's family history, and the Moscow Olympics were experienced by the author directly. There is no hearsay in this book: everything is based either in personal memory, or in the hard memory of documents.
In the vortex of Victor's adventures, we find Ukrainian laborers in today's Europe, KGB agents from Brezhnev's time, journalists from «Voice of...» radio stations before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Russian mafia thugs busy colonizing the world.
Technical details: 1.256 000 characters, 222 000 words
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Leningrad, a novel by Igor Vishnevetsky (2010)
Rights sold: World English - Dalkey Archive Press, Italy - Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina (Incroci di Civiltà), Macedonia - BATA PRESS MILLENNIUM, Russia - VREMYA
2011 NOS literary award
2010 "Novyi mir" literary magazine award for the best fiction
Vishnevetsky’s Leningrad is a masterful mixture of prosaic and poetical texts, excerpts from private letters and diaries, quotes from newspapers and NKVD internal documents, in which the author fuses rough documentary with philosophical grotesque and depicts the Siege as a moment of truth for Leningrad artists and white-collars. The story is told through the correspondence and diary entries of the protagonists, the Composer, his lover Vera and Vera’s husband, the naval officer intercepting enemy communications for the Russia’s Baltic Fleet positioned in and in front of Leningrad. The love triangle ends tragically when Vera, pregnant from her lover, decides to leave the besieged city but meets a macabre death, while the Composer at the same time mentally collapses and possibly dies of hunger, unaware of his lover’s fate.
The most inhuman conditions of the Siege, starvation and continuous bombing and shelling make the background to the story. For the first time in modern Russian literature Vishnevetsky brings up the issue of vitality of moral and ethical values cultivated and magnified by Russian intelligentsia, and their ability to confront the cruel reality. In their wild attempts to survive the protagonists hold on to their art, ideas, and sentiments over which neither Bolsheviks, nor Nazis, not even the death itself have power.
Vishnevetsky’s narrative departs into highly experimental and emotionally charged discussion of “ultimate questions” of one’s existence. In this regard his Leningrad closes the gap between present-day Russian letters and the tradition of Russian philosophical novel which existed uninterrupted until the 1940’s.
Russia's stunningly beautiful second city, formerly and now St Petersburg, but known as Leningrad between 1924 and 1991, has had a unique character since Peter the Great built it as his window on the West at the start of the 18th century. As Petrograd (1914-24) it witnessed the Russian Revolutions of 1917. The Siege of Leningrad during WWII is one of the most moving, stirring, and horrific tales of human ingenuity and endurance in history.
The destruction of Leningrad was one of Adolf Hitler's strategic objectives in attacking the Soviet Union. Hitler's plan was to subdue Leningrad through blockade, bombardment, and starvation prior to seizing the city. The Siege of Leningrad was a prolonged military operation. It started on September 8, 1941, when the last land connection to the city was severed. Although the Red Army managed to open a narrow land corridor to the city in 1943, the final lifting of the siege took place only in 1944, 872 days after it began.
The two-and-a-half year siege caused the greatest destruction and the largest loss of life ever known in a modern city. The 872 days of the siege resulted in unparalleled famine in the Leningrad region through disruption of utilities, water, energy and food supplies. This resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 civilians and soldiers and the evacuation of 1,400,000 more inhabitants of the city, mainly women and children, many of whom died during evacuation due to starvation and bombardment.
Human losses in Leningrad on both sides exceeded those of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Moscow, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The siege of Leningrad remains the most lethal siege in world history.
Civilians in the city suffered from extreme starvation, especially in winter of 1941–1942. Between November 1941 and February 1942 the only food available to the citizen was 125 grams of bread, of which 50–60% consisted of sawdust and other inedible admixtures, and distributed with ration cards. In conditions of extreme temperatures (down to -30°C) and city transport being out of service, the distance of a few kilometers to work or the food distributing kiosks were insurmountable obstacles for many citizens. People often died on the streets, and citizens shortly became accustomed to the look of death. Reports of cannibalism appeared in the winter of 1941–1942, after all birds and pets were eaten by survivors.
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