ELKOST International literary agency
Toggle Navigation
  • News
  • Authors A-M
    • Yuri Borisov
      • Books
      • Sample translations
    • Yuri Buida
      • Books
      • Media reviews
      • Sample translations
    • Ksenia Buksha
      • Books
    • Ivan Chistyakov
      • Books
      • Media reviews
      • Sample translations
    • Alexander Chudakov
      • Books
      • Sample translations
    • Marietta Chudakova
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Oleg Dorman
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Umberto Eco
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Ilya Ehrenburg
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Andrei Gelasimov
      • Books
    • Fazil Iskander
      • Books
      • Media reviews
      • Sample translations
    • Andrei Ivanov
      • Books
      • Media reviews
      • Sample translations
    • Kirill Kobrin
      • Books
    • Andrei Kofman
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Nikolai Kononov
      • Books
    • Elena Kostioukovitch
      • Books
      • Media reviews
      • Interviews
    • Maya Kucherskaya
      • Books
      • Media reviews
      • Interviews
    • Yuri Lotman
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Alexander Luria
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Józef Mackiewicz
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Vladimir Makanin
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Olga Medvedkova
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • MEMORIAL
    • Agnes Mironova
      • Books
      • Sample translations
    • Ilya Mitrofanov
      • Books
      • Media reviews
  • Authors N-Z
    • Victor Nekrasov
      • Books
    • Alexander Okun
      • Books
    • Yuri Olesha
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Vladislav Otroshenko
      • Books
      • Media reviews
      • Interviews
      • Sample translations
    • Sergey Parkhomenko
      • Books
      • Sample translations
    • Mariam Petrosyan
      • Books
      • Media reviews
      • Interviews
      • Sample translations
    • Elena Rzhevskaya
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Natalya Semenova
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Vladimir Sharov
      • Books
    • Irina Sherbakova
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Mikhail Shevelev
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Viktor Shklovsky
    • Grigory Sluzhitel
      • Books
    • Sasha Sokolov
      • Books
      • Media reviews
      • Interviews
      • Sample translations
    • Ludmila Ulitskaya
      • Books
      • Media reviews
      • Interviews
      • Journalism
      • Sample translations
    • Sana Valiulina
      • Books
    • Marina Vishnevetskaya
      • Books
      • Media reviews
    • Igor Vishnevetsky
      • Books
      • Media reviews
      • Sample translations
    • Stanislav Vostokov
      • Books
    • Guzel Yakhina
      • Books
    • Anthologies & series
      • Creative comparison of cultures
  • Our sub-agents
  • Our clients
  • About us

News

Articles
Title
JUST PUBLISHED: Guzel Yakhina's Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes in Lithuania
JUST PUBLISHED: Ludmila Ulitskaya's Yakov's Ladder in Sweden
JUST PUBLISHED: Ludmila Ulitskaya's Daniel Stein, Interpreter in Bulgaria
Guzel Yakhina in Germany, June 2017
JUST PUBLISHED: The House That... by Mariam Petrosyan in English
Writer Elena Rzhevskaya dies at 98
JUST PUBLISHED: Guzel Yakhina's Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes in Italy
JUST PUBLISHED: Ludmila Ulitskaya's Discarded Relics in France
JUST PUBLISHED: Marina Palei's Choir in Spain
JUST PUBLISHED: Guzel Yakhina's Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes in Netherlands
JUST PUBLISHED: Elena Kostioukovitch's Why Italians... in China
JUST PUBLISHED: Guzel Yakhina's Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes in Germany
JUST PUBLISHED: Guzel Yakhina's Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes in Estonia
Days of Russian Literature, Literaturhaus Zurich, 24-26 February 2017
Lire Magazine named Mariam Petrosyan's The House That the best fantasy book of 2016

Page 5 of 24

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • facebook
  • twitter
  • email
  • instagram
  • Linkedin
  • XING
  • Print
  • Whatsapp
  • Telegram

Featured titles

  • The Night We Disappeared, a novel by Nikolai Kononov

    Rights sold: Russia - INDIVIDUUM

     

    This is a polyphonic novel ambitious both in terms of its literary quality and the issues it discusses: xenophobia, inequality, post-memory, the "right turn," and anarchy. It is, of course, also a book about a search for identity, both among individuals and within the territories of Eastern Europe, where inhabitants suffered over and over during social upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries. The novel is centered on a phenomenon of apatrides - people rejected by their homeland who - against their will - became citizens of the world.

    The plot-lines of the three main characters in Kononov’s novel are all set between 1919 and 1951. All three are refugees from the Russian and Soviet empires: they are exiles, stateless persons. Even so, history gave each a chance to play their own role in history before, during, and after World War II. Their  trauma and pain affect their descendants – our contemporaries – in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

    A young woman – a teacher who was raised by a dedicated Marxist mother in the USSR in the 1930s – suddenly converts to Christianity while surviving the Nazi occupation in the city of Pskov during WWII. She later witnesses a lesbian relationship developing between two young schoolgirls in a refugee camp. A White Russian émigré pretends to be a Bolshevik spy, deceives the German military-intelligence service, then falls in love with an anarchist woman and tries to turn the theory of love’s powerlessness into  reality. A German refugee suffers from a dissociative identity disorder because he is unable to cope with the fact that he had betrayed his parents while saving his own life.

    The circumstances of the lives of these three characters are told in letters, diaries, and documents discovered by our contemporaries: one of them is a high school girl who openly expresses an outrage against the war in Ukraine, another is a student working on her dissertation on the history of anarchism in a London apartment, the third is a German who was recently released from prison after serving a sentence for committing murder in the heat of passion.

    The Night We Disappeared  is about an individual’s bewilderment when facing a changing world and its uncontrollable brute forces. It’s about the utter fiasco of existing social structures, and the urgent need for new forms and ways of social interaction.

     

    Read more...
  • THE DIARY OF A GULAG PRISON GUARD by Ivan Chistyakov (1934-1936, NF)

    Rights sold: Czech Republic – EUROMEDIA, Estonia - ARGO, France – DeNoël, Germany - MSB Matthes & Seitz, Italy - Pearson Paravia (Bruno Mondadori), Netherlands - Ambo | Anthos Uitgevers, Poland - BELLONA, Russia - CORPUS, World English - GRANTA, US - PEGASUS

    Ivan Chistyakov’s diary is unique historical testimony. He commanded an armed guard unit on a section of BAM, the Baikal-Amur Railway which was built by forced labour.

    We have few memoirs written even by people on the outside of the barbed wire. This diary, written inside the Gulag, gives a day by day account of life there over several months in 1935-36 and is probably unique.

    The original diary is in the safekeeping of the Memorial human rights centre in Moscow which, since the late 1980s, has been collecting documents, testimony, memoirs, and letters relevant to the history of political repression in the USSR. It was passed to them by people who had come upon it among the papers left by a distant female relative.

    The diary consists of two medium-sized exercise books. One describes three days in August 1934 which Chistyakov spent hunting, before being conscripted into the interior troops and sent to BAM.  His notes are reminiscent of Ivan Turgenev’s classic A Hunter’s Sketches, illustrated by the author. They suggest nostalgia for the old, pre-revolutionary Russia and are in total contrast to the other notebook, which was written in 1935-36 when Chistyakov was working in the Gulag.

    We do not know where Ivan Chistyakov was in 1939 when, along the railway built by the labour of prisoners he had guarded in 1935-36, long echelons of wagons passed bearing new prisoners to BAM. Among them was one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets, Nikolai Zabolotsky.

    It is a miracle that Chistyakov’s diary, whose entries break off, probably, with his arrest, somehow survived, that it did not fall into the hands of NKVD officials, that it was not discarded and destroyed, and that somebody managed to send it to Moscow.

    Thanks to this miracle, one more voice of a lonely man who lived in a fearful era has come down to us.

    Read more...

MAIN OFFICE: Yulia Dobrovolskaya, c/Londres, 78, 6-1, 08036 Barcelona, Spain, phone 0034 63 9413320, 0034 93 3221232, e-mail rights@elkost.com
OFFICE IN ITALY: Elena Kostioukovitch, via Sismondi 5, Milano 20133, Italy, phone 0039 02 87236557, 0039 346 5064334, fax 0039 700444601, e-mail elkost@elkost.com
General inquiries and manuscript submissions: russianoffice@elkost.com

Aviso legal. Política de privacidad. Política de cookies.

Back to Top

© 2025 ELKOST International literary agency

In order to provide you with the best online experience this website uses cookies.

By using our website, you agree to our use of cookies. Learn more

I agree