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
    • 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
Elena Kostioukovitch in Sofia, December 2025
NEW RELEASE: Kyiv. A Fortress Over the Abyss by Elena Kostioukovitch
Marina Vishnevetskaya wins the 2024 Vitruvio-Le Muse Award
Lyudmila Ulitskaya awarded the Günter Grass-Preis 2023 for her life's work
Lyudmila Ulitskaya receives the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize 2023
MEMORIAL human rights group and Ales Bialiatski got the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize
Ludmila Ulitskaya named a winner of the 2022 Formentor Prize
2022 – The Year of Józef Mackiewicz
NEW RELEASE: Yakhina's Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes in Norway
NEW RELEASE: Ulitskaya's The Big Green Tent in Japan
NEW RELEASE: OST in English
NEW RELEASE: Yakhina´s Train to Samarkand in Romania
MEMORIAL International awarded the 2021 JAN MICHALSKI PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
RIP Marietta Chudakova (1937-2021)
Yakhina's novel named the best translated novel of the 2021 in France

Page 1 of 24

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

Featured titles

  • 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.

    Read more...
  • A Gift of Speech, a novel by Yuri Buida

    Rights sold: Russia - AST, World Arabic - Ebdaat Alamia

     

    This novel is a family saga talking about a constant conflict of fathers and sons, and their responsibility towards each other.

    In his Gift of Speech Buida looks at the Russian history of 20th and 21st centuries through the representatives of the most privileged and educated layer of its society, members of the Soviet aristocracy that came into existence after the Bolshevik revolution. Notwithstanding a fantastic concentration of mysterious and tragic events in the life of the Shkuratov clan, its trajectory follows the ups and downs of their native country: first Soviet Union, later the post-Soviet Russia.

    The story is told in the first person by Ilya Schramm, a member of Shkuratov family, who was raised by a single mother until the age of 16, and only then was told that he was in fact an illegitimate son of Boris Shkuratov, a member of Communist elite, a popular TV host and political journalist. From this day on, a new world opens for Ilya, he enters the exotic inner circle of Moscow's Soviet aristocracy. For the following thirty years, all kind of events happen to the members of Shkuratov clan and their close friends, most of which end up tragically.

    Ilya Schramm who (not without his father's help) became a successful lawyer specializing in international law, has tried to shun the Shkuratovs during all of his adult life, but his love for Shasha, a lover of his half-brother Didim, binds him to the family. Ilya finds documents showing that his paternal grandfather Vissarion Shkuratov, a top-shot at the NKVD in Stalin’s times, was a sadist and murderer, while his wife Margo, Boris Shkurartov’s mother, was an informer who sent many innocent people to the camps. Although both were repressed during the Stalinist purges, in the late fifties they
    returned from the camps, regained their former privileges, and secured the future of their son Boris.

     

     

    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