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Articles
Title
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
NEW RELEASE: Yakhina's Children of the Volga in Serbia

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Featured titles

  • Asan, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (2008)

    Rights sold: Albania - OMSCA-1, France - GALLIMARD, Germany - LUCHTERHAND, Netherlands - DE ARBEIDERSPERS, Poland - REBIS, Russia - IZDATELSTVO E, Slovenia - Modrijan, Spain - ACANTILADO, Turkey - ALFA

    Winner of the 2008 Big Book Award

    On the surface, Vladimir Makanin’s Asan is a stream-of-consciousness account of events in the life of the Russian manager of a military warehouse in Chechnia. Deeper down, Asan is less a book about Russia’s Chechen wars than a novel showing how war forces participants and observers to piece together narratives that explain or justify actions.

    At the centre of Makanin’s narrive is major Aleksandr Sergeevich Zhilin, nicknamed Asan by his fellow officers. He finds himself running a supply depot during both the first and second wars, supplying the Russian troops with fuel--and running his own little business on the side. A basically honest man, Major Zhilin is still one of those corrupt officers who used the war to make money for themselves, something that enables him to protect injured or runaway soldiers, and help desperate mothers ransom their sons who have been captured by Chechen forces. Is Major Zhilin a self-centered schemer, or a modern-day Russian Robin Hood? A bit of both, it seems.

    Like most "Chechen" works, Asan is at its heart a tragedy, and full of the brutal details of the Chechen wars, where there were no real good guys; rape, pillage, torture, and murder were all commonplace; and even support officers in the rear could find themselves held at gunpoint or pawing through piles of dismembered corpses. But it juxtaposes that brutality with flashes of lyricism and heartfelt sympathy for the people caught up in the war. In the novel, Asan is both the name of a bloodthirsty mythological figure and of a person trying to do the most good he can in bad circumstances, and maybe stay alive against the odds. 

    Asan patches multiple stories together to form a rough novel about rough topics. Of course war, as Makanin reminds readers on several of Asan’s pages, is an absurd venture. You can’t understand it, says Zhilin, and there’s no logic. In short, truth slips and myths gain strength as Zhilin attempts to make sense of events, his actions, and his life. Asan is not about the kinds of war truths we expect from newspapers. It’s about how people try to order chaos by transforming war’s realities, commodities as elusive as sun bunnies, into a myth. Novel's message about money, truth, and war are important reflections of sociopolitical life in today’s world.

    The most important thing in the book isn’t the topic, the scenes, the double break with genre, or the irony of the story but the character, the central figure. Makanin hit the mark, he DISCOVERED: he discovered a character whose biography and way of life could be the key to understanding an era, a metaphor for contemporary life. -- Lev Danilkin, a literary critic

    Read more...
  • ROSE OF THE WINDS, a novel by Andrei Gelasimov

    Rights sold:  France - SYRTES, Russia - GORODETZ

    An adventure novel set in mid-19 century and telling a story of a Russian navigator and explorer of Siberia Gennady Nevelskoy.

    Read more...

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