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Featured titles
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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.
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High Society Dinners: Dining in Tsarist Russia by Yuri Lotman and Jelena Pogosjan (NF)
Rights sold: Estonia - TANAPAEV, World English rights – PROSPECT BOOKS
Many writers and researchers around the world now write prodigiously on the topic that engages all of us several times a day: food. And its history. It used to be that those of us interested in the history of food found the pickings pretty slim. Yuri Lotman and Jelena Pogosjan's High Society Dinners: Dining in Tsarist Russia deserves a wide readership among scholars and researchers and writers currently working on food- and culinary-related subjects, as well as curious general readers.
High Society Dinners, originally published posthumously in Russian in 1996 – Yuri Lotman having died in 1993 – technically consists of a number of menus for meals served at the opulent house of Petr Pavlovich Durnovo – Adjutant-General of the Tsar's Imperial Suite – during the period ranging from the spring of 1857 through 1858. Durnovo included diary-like comments with most of these menus, making the material an even richer source. Lotman devotes over 116 pages to a description of Russian cuisine it history, the background to the menus, and social structure and mores. He consistently references Russian literature as a source for culinary comments and digressed on French cuisine – highly important at the time among the Russian noble class. And, in addition, he relies on Ekaterina Avdeeva's 1842 cookbook, The Experienced Russian Housewife's Handbook.
The menus themselves would be useful enough for what they reveal about culinary culture in Russia, but Yuri Lotman's commentary is invaluable, dissecting the dining rituals and social circles of the participants. Durnovo's menus and guest lists, interspersed with extracts from family letters and the leading newspapers and journals of the day, set in context the domestic and gastronomic underpinnings of life in this group at the heart of the Russian empire.
High Society Dinners offers extraordinary insight into the domestic arrangements of the Russian aristocracy. It opens up a window onto a historical period of great interest via detailed primary material not normally associated with food and culinary matters.
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