Featured titles
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The Witness, a novel by Ilya Mitrofanov (1993)
Rights sold: Germany - Volk und Welt, Italy - Isbn Edizioni, Spain - Lumen, Poland - Claroscuro
"This novel is intensely passionate, and rich in fresh images and patterns..." (Silvia Bambino, The Wanity Fair)
"The Witness" is the first-person narrative of the life story of a simple human being, a barber Fedor Petrovich, whose life's most intense and dramatic period was the incorporation of his native Bessarabia into the Soviet Union in 1940, accompanied by coercion from the new command structure, which affected social relationships and caused enormous suffering due to famine brought on both by prolonged drought and by mistakes in official planning and preparation.
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In the speck on the map called Kotlovina, the entire historical drama, starting with the so-called Soviet liberation from Romanian rule, was played out to its horrible end with very few survivors to live and tell about it.
The novel's success is based on the vivid and laconic presentation of its characters. "The Witness" projects the speech pattern of a simple, uneducated man. This style makes use of down-to-earth expressions, is unafraid of repetitions, takes notice of the simple things in life (of a person's outward appearance, of smells and fragrances, all very appropriate to a barber's profession), is not averse to rudeness in language and behavior, and above all is a stranger to all dissembling and pretense. The events told are viewed through the prism of recollection, which softens their horrible contours somewhat and which allows the theme of brotherhood to emerge and feelings of hatred to dissolve. Honesty and lack of pretense are the author's hallmark, and it is these features which characterize his artistic expression. -
Eisen, a novel by Guzel Yakhina (2025)
Rights sold: Azerbaijan - QANUN, Croatia - HENA, Czech Republic - PROSTOR, Estonia – TANAPAEV, France - NOIR SUR BLANC, Germany - KANON VERLAG, Hungary - HELICON, Italy - E/O, Netherlands - QUERIDO, Poland - NOIR SUR BLANC, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - LAGUNA, Spain - ACANTILADO, Turkey - ALFA, World English - EUROPA EDITIONS UK/USA, World Arabic - RASHM
Sergei Eisenstein remains among the most famous and revered figures in the history of world cinema. His masterpieces Battleship Potemkin, October, ¡Que viva México!, Ivan the Terrible, and the destroyed Bezhin Meadow, have been vigorously studied and became – along with most of Eisenstein’s theoretical writings – an integral part of the programs of all film schools. Naturally, anyone who pretends being a cinema connoisseur has at least once seen one or two of Eisenstein’s movies.
Eisenstein, who was a famous movie director and theorist, wrote a lot about the art of cinema, about himself and his contemporaries, and left after himself a huge archive of drawings and diaries, thus reliably fixing his place in history. However, Sergei Eisenstein has never been a main hero of any work of literary fiction. Guzel Yakhina's novel is the first literary biography of the legendary director whom his closest friends nicknamed Eisen.
Yakhina tells Eisenstein's personal story through the process of making films, from the first to the last; the movements of his artistic soul, the conflicts and other circumstances that shaped Eisen's personality are examined through the prism of the his main passion, and masterfully woven into a vivid fabric of artistic text.
Eisenstein's creative process is the nerve of her narrative covering his entire life against the backdrop of wars and revolutions that shook the world in the first half of the 20 century. The people surrounding Eisen – his family, colleagues, women, bosses, actors, – are all involved in his mono-performance. Yakhina’s protagonist seeks and finds ways to always remain in the center of attention, to evoke strong feelings he so desperately needs; he manipulates the emotions of both his loved ones, and of the audience.
A literary biography created by Yakhina not only explores the nature of Eisenstein’s personality and genius. By bravely expanding the boundaries of her narrative, she analyzes the nature of art in a totalitarian state. Eisenstein reaches the pinnacle of self-expression by subjugating History, which is exactly what the young Soviet state demanded: to give the masses a new History that would replace the old, outdated one. Having once discovered the main secret of cinema and other visual arts, – “people believe what we show on the screen, so what we show eventually converts into the truth”, – Eisen develops and perfections his own artistic method consisting in triggering a strong emotional response in his viewers, and ingeniously realizes the concept of art under totalitarianism, replacing critical perception of reality by an invented, cinematic reality. According to Yakhina, the price paid by Sergei Eisenstein for this secret knowledge, for the power he gained over the audience, and for resulting world fame is quite similar to that of Dr. Faustus's.
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