Featured titles
-
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.”
Read more... -
All Over Again, a foodie travelogue by Sergei Parkhomenko (NF)
Rights sold: Russia - CORPUS
It took me as many as thirteen years to write the fifty-six sketches that make up this book. I first wrote something in this peculiar genre in 2004 and the latest of these texts came along in 2017.
I have always felt that gastronomy was a very important and in a sense fundamental branch of human knowledge. And not just because the gastronomic experiences, as someone aptly phrased it, are a unique conglomerate of sensations supplied by all five human senses – taste, smell, sight, hearing, and touch – and in this regard only sex can fully compete with them. Another source of its importance is that gastronomy quite naturally turns out to be a literally undrainable source of incredibly fascinating snippets from people’s lives.
The workings of all five senses leave five distinct imprints in your memory. Coming together and superimposing, they are the only thing capable of creating a truly vivid, three-dimensional picture of a minute that flew by once upon a time and maybe even of a full day that was once lived.
It turns out that I am not writing gastronomical sketches; rather I am infinitely adapting and readapting the story about the evanescence of all that exists, the story that unfolds again and again, in different circumstances and various shapes.
Oddly enough, every such experience turned out to be firmly tied not only to a specific year, a point on the time axis, but also to another point – on the geographical map.
I know it may sound absurd, flippant, even grotesque, but hear me out: a thing meant to be put on a plate and eventually end up in a stomach, turns out to be a universal fabric tying together time and space.
Original language: Russian. Around 350.000 words.
Read more...