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Featured titles
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Opens Inward, collected short stories by Ksenia Buksha
Rights sold: Russia - AST
Longlisted for the 2019 National Bestseller Award
Ksenia Buksha's 2018 collection of short stories, Opens Inward, follows a transport route stretching from one end of her own Petersburg region to the other while interlocking its denizens in a poignant triptych of birth (“Orphanage”), life (“The Asylum”), and death (“Last Stop”).
Buksha’s collection provides a fitting occasion for reviving old cliché: this is “a whole world packed under a single cover.” Dozens of stories,all true to life, weave together, intersect, and fall apart around the trajectory of Route 306. Characters drive along it, wait beside it, or watch it from their windows. Those who star as protagonists in one story make a brief cameos in others, flash in and out of the reader’s peripheral vision, and simply pop up in conversation, creating the illusion of a space that is both very dense and thoroughly inhabited. That space also feels practically infinite — it stretches far beyond the horizon.
The book is divided into three parts. The first, titled “The Orphanage,” displays all the possible species and subspecies of parentlessness from all possible angles. Thirteen year-old Asya suspects that the woman who raised her is not her birth mother and takes great pains to construct the questions that might enable her to learn the truth about herself. On the way, she adopts three children from an orphanage: a tame young girl named Dasha who is still grieving her own recentlydeceased mother and two orphaned boys — the mischievous Roma and his brother, little Seryozha. In another story, terrible teen Angelica battles her adoptive mother “Aunt Lena,” a chess coach, without realizing what terrible cost Lena paid to save her from slavery in a children’s home. (The reader does realize this at the very end of the story, but only thanks to a brief aside tossed out by one of the characters.) Zhenya, a grown-up orphan who seems to have been entirely well-socialized, makes occasional trips to the city to meet her doppleganger, the person she could have been if her life had been just slightly different. Alisa, who takes drugs that have expanded her waistline to the point that she passes for pregnant, sits in the foyer of a swimming pool watching a strange, lonely boy in a ragged jacket.
The book’s second part, “The Asylum,” unites stories of insanity, some of which are autonomous and some of which are connected to the orphans. It is here, for example, that we discover exactly what pills Alisa has been taking. The last part, “Finale,” features stories of death in which many of the book’s plots find their end or acquire a new beginning. This is where we learn how Dasha’s mother died and just what happened to the parents of the boy wearing rags.
All that said, the borders between the parts of Opens Inward feel provisional, just like any attempt to dismember the variegated, fluid, morally ambiguous fabric of being. And it is that wholeness, that highly tragic amorality, that incredible ability to convey existential horror without falling into either sentimentality or despair, that is the greatest achievement of this brilliant — and that's not an exaggeration — collection by Ksenia Buksha. In a word, if anyone alive today can lay claim to the title of the Russian Alice Munro, it is undoubtedly she.
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Leon Bakst, Portrait of an Artist as a Jew. True biography of Léon Bakst, by Olga Medvedkova (NF)
Rights sold: France - MARE & MARTIN, Russia - NLO
A multitude of existing exhibition catalogs and books dedicated to Léon Bakst and his art all avoid two fundamental problems of Bakst’s complex personality: his biography and Jewish identity, and his intellectual ambition. The vagueness regarding Bakst’s biography is largely due to the fact that the biographical information was provided by the children of Bakst’s sister. Shunning any archival research, they relied on two types of sources: contemporary publications by Bakst (personal lore) and his sister’s memory (family tradition). Neither were discussed or challenged by archival material.
Many years of scientific research into the life and work of Bakst brought Olga Medvedkova to creation of a fascinating historical and artistic biography, exceptionally deep and substantiated, based on archival findings, documents, memories of Bakst's contemporaties and colleagues. Medvedvova offers a close look at great artist's life and mystifications he surrunded himself with, at steps he undertook in search for his historical roots, at philosophical basis of his creative activities, and his unique way of uniting East and West, Renaissance, Greece, and Nietzschean ideas interpreted by Russian philosophers. Thanks to Medvedkova's professional knowledge, curiosity, impartiality, and her original interpretation of historical context, a pictorial and extravagant figure of her protagonist to a different level of understanding.
The book is originally written in Russian and has around 120.000 words.
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Léon Bakst (1866-1924) was a Russian painter and scene and costume designer. Bakst’s fame mostly lay in the ballets he designed for the Sergei Diaghilev Ballets Russes, for which he designed exotic, richly coloured sets and costumes. He belonged to that young generation of European artists who rebelled against 19th century stage realism, which had become pedantic and literal, without imagination or theatricality. There were no specialist trained theatre designers, so painters like Vuillard in France, Munch in Scandinavia, Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois in Russia turned their painting skills to theatre design.
In 1910 Bakst settled in Paris where he worked on productions for Diaghilev. The premiere of Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’Aprés-midi d’un faune in 1912, the entire stage design for which was designed by Léon Bakst, was marked by scandal, discussion of which continued on the front pages of newspapers for days afterwards. The scenario shared the dreamlike ambience of Mallarmé’s poem. Nijinsky played the faun; roused from slumber, he tried to woo a passing nymph, who as she escaped left behind a veil. The faun embraced the veil with a final orgasmic shudder – a closing gesture that gave rise to the ensuing controversy. Yet it was analytical approach to movement that makes Faune a turning point in dance history; in it, Nijinsky and Bakst made the first steps towards abstraction in dance.
His depth of knowledge and feeling about period and place allowed him to absorb the spirit of a culture and translate it into theatrical terms without destroying the essence. Bakst’s brilliant control of colour, line and decoration give his stage pictures a visual rhythm. Particularly notable are Bakst's imaginative and sensuous use of colour, his eroticism, and his appreciation of the human body in movement.
Bakst's performances became a sensation, and his designs spilled over into fashion and interior design, sweeping away drab colours and introducing looser clothes. An example of the fame and recognition that Bakst gained in the first two decades of the 20th century is the fact that he is mentioned approvingly in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.
Léon Bakst died in 1924 but after nearly 100 years his magic is as potent as ever, rediscovered by every generation. His influence was such that people who have never heard his name now see the world in a different way.
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