ELKOST International literary agency - National Prize in China 2006

Featured titles

Blue and Red, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1983)

Rights sold: Italy - Edizioni e/o,

Makanin’s view of man’s nature is a pessimistic one, and his depictions of love and harmonious interrelationships lack the power of his descriptions of man’s inhumanity to man (or to beast). He is most at ease describing love linked to violence, as in Blue and Red (Goluhoe i krasnoe) (1983), which describes how two grandmothers battle for the love of their young grandson Kliucharev, who is ‘unused to love’ — a phrase which perhaps could be used to describe many of Makanin’s heroes.The love which Makanin’s heroes advocate is a tough, universal and unselfish love, as typified by the healer Yakushkin with his philosophy of brotherly love in Makanin's previous novel Predlecha (1982). It is love for one’s family and kin, love for one’s people, birthplace, for Russia, love which has a basis in conscience, which interests Makanin, which means that his characters, are seekers after truth, not the comfort of relationships dominated by nostalgia or by habit.

CASE OF ENGINEER TOWN, 2008

Rights sold: Russia – Chronicler

A nomad city of Karakorum, capital of the Mongol Empire (the map of which is just identical to a map of the Russian Empire), appears suddenly in the beginning of XVIII century in the area of Novocherkassk City in the Province of Don Cossack Voisko. The city does not fit into the picture of the real world; it moves every day a couple kilometers from the point it was seen before; Mongol Emperor Tughe, the ruler of the city, knows nothing about the existence of Russian Emperor Alexander (who in turn has never heard of Tughe).

Otroshenko creates a reality in which the relation between incidents, characters, and setting could not be based upon or justified by laws of nature or their normal acceptance by human mentality.