ELKOST International literary agency - National Prize in China 2006

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A TRACE IN THE FOOTPRINT, a novel by Vladimir Sharov

Rights sold: Russia - OLMA, ARSIS BOOKS, World Arabic - DREAMBOOK

A Trace in the Footprint is a family saga set in twentieth century Russia. The plot follows a character named Fyodor who begins to research the genealogy of his adoptive father, Golosov. This leads to the unraveling of a whole century of family history beginning with his great-grandfather. Fyodor soon discovers that his family’s history is inextricably linked to that of the Socialist Revolutionaries, the political party that would eventually split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The novel depicts the changes in Fyodor’s family after being forced to adapt to the political and social changes that took place after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Critically, the novel was praised for its classical narration reminiscent of Tolstoy’s realism.

Once published in hard copy in 1992, the book sold over 25,000 copies in Russia.

Sharov’s A Trace in the Footprint has been compared by critics to the 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Marquez. Where Sharov’s story follows a Russian family, Marquez’s novel tells a multigenerational story of the Buendia family from Colombia. Similarly to Sharov, Marquez’s story plunges into the true events that occurred but places a fictional family at the forefront. The result of the novels is the same, although fictional, the novels recreate the emotions felt in times of historical turmoil. Both stories accurately depict a family struggling to keep up with the socio-political changes that happen around them.

Get Lost, Crocodile, a novel by Marina Vishneventskaya (2002)

In Vishnevetskaya’s Came the Moon out of Mist and Get Lost, Crocodile! the search for female identity is formulated as a drama in the genre of lyric parable. The heroines question what it means to “be a woman” in the contradicting societal ideologies of the post-Soviet epoch. The distorted implementation of the laws of capitalist consumption often does not coincide with the patriarchal model of the family, which, in turn, is discredited by cynical views of the Soviet citizen. According to Vishnevetskaya, the heroine can be “freed from the spell,” in other words reveal her essence, or “extinguish”— erase that which is overly incomprehensible. These metaphysical operations either unearth the woman’s essence, or turn her into an automaton. Notably, revealing the trapped female essence or vice versa, repressing it is carried out not so much by the external world, not by the man whom she chose as a lover or who chose her, but by the woman herself.