"I Will Fight for Freedom" by Mikhail Khodorkovsky is listed as one of the five recommended non-fiction books of 2011 by "Polska the Times" newspaper.
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Morozov: The Story of a Family and a Lost Collection, by Natalya Semenova (NF)
Rights sold: World English - YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, France - ACTES SUD, Italy - JOHAN & LEVI, Russia - SLOVO
Winner of the 2021 The Art Newspaper Russia Prize
The first account of Ivan Morozov and his ambition to build one of the world’s greatest collections of modern art
A wealthy Moscow textile merchant, Morozov started buying art in a modest way in 1900 until, on a trip to Paris, he developed a taste for the avant-garde. Meticulous and highly discerning, he acquired works by the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cezanne. Unlike his friendly rival Sergei Shchukin, he collected Russian as well as European art. Altogether he spent 1.5 million francs on 486 paintings and 30 sculptures—more than any other collector of the age.
Natalya Semenova traces Morozov’s life, family, and achievements, and sheds light on the interconnected worlds of European and Russian art at the turn of the century. Morozov always intended to leave his art to the state—but with the Revolution in 1917 he found himself appointed “assistant curator” to his own collection. He fled Russia and his collection was later divided between Moscow and St. Petersburg, only to languish in storage for decades.
Morozov: The Story of a Family and a Lost Collection is being published to coincide with "The Morozov Collection" exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in September 2021Praise for Mozorov:
"A century of Russian culture distilled in the story of the life, family and collection of the lavish, lazy, kindly, eccentric grandson of a serf who brought Monet and Matisse to Moscow, waited three years for the right 'Blue Gauguin'—and survived the first years of Bolshevik rule."—Jackie Wullschläger, Financial Times "Best Books of 2020: Visual Arts"
"Semenova was wise to widen the focus, and make this the biography of a family, and also of a collection … The descriptions of their activities read like raw material for Gogol or Dostoevsky." —Martin Gayford, Spectator
"It is difficult to imagine what further revelations might usurp [Semenova’s] volumes on Morozov and Shchukin as the definitive studies of their patronage … These far-sighted Russian patrons merit their own place in the story of modern French art." —Rosalind P. Blakesley, Literary Review
"What is clear to me ... is the need we now have of that harmony, that tranquillity and joy, that Ivan Morozov sought and found in the paintings that, one way or another, he bequeathed to posterity." —Simon Wilson, Royal Academy Magazine
"This book is a tribute to the commitment of a patron of the arts and a timely warning about the arbitrary power of the state to destroy and mishandle material." —Alexander Adams, Alexander Adams Art
"The art historian Natalya Semenova, who told the story of Shchukin and his collection three years ago, now brings her expertise and narrative verve to the less well-known Morozov." —Lesley Chamberlain, Times Literary Supplement
"Semenova has performed a valuable service in telling us this entertaining story of how Morozov first brought [his collection] together ... Something that all art lovers should be grateful for." —Martin Bentham, Evening Standard
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Under the Green Tent, a novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2010)
Rights sold: Brazil - Editora34, Croatia - FRAKTURA, Czech Republic - PASEKA, Estonia – TANAPAEV, Finland - SILTALA, France – GALLIMARD, Germany – HANSER, Greece - KASTANIOTIS, Hungary – MAGVETO, Iran - Houpaa Books, Italy – BOMPIANI, Japan - Shinchosha, Lithuania - JOTEMA, The Netherlands – DE GEUS, Norway – CAPPELEN DAMM, Poland – BAUER-WELTBILD, Romania - Humanitas, Russia - EKSMO, AST, Serbia - ARHIPELAG, Slovakia – SLOVART, Sweden - Ersatz, Turkey - ITHAKI, World English rights - FSG
In the best traditions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Ulitskaya raises the bar with each successive book, taking on increasingly more demanding artistic and intellectual challenges and becoming a writer for everybody, not only for her own home readership. She moves far beyond the framework of tired cliches about the enigmatic Russian soul, and in place of laboured and portentous questions proffers her own answers.
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Her new novel can justly claim a place in the first rank of an international hierarchy of major works which form the ideas through which their age is understood.
‘Imago’ is a term from biological science and, trained as a biologist, Ulitskaya deciphers human personality in genetic and medical terms in all her books. The imago is the phase in the development of an insect which corresponds to its formal adulthood. The insect imago is capable of reproduction and gradually proceeds through life to death. For a human being, however, the civilised and intelligent homo sapiens, there is potentially more to this phase, a phase of maturity, adulthood, responsibility, mental development, self-sacrifice and struggle.
Imago begins with the death of Stalin and his monstrous funeral attended by many millions and fraught with death. At the funeral the crowd in the centre of Moscow trampled one and a half thousand people to death, a fact concealed by the Soviet censorship. The finale of the novel is the death of the great Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky.
The heroes of Imago are three friends who come together in solidarity during their school years and live their entire lives side by side. Three small boys develop in a Moscow school under the watchful eye of a gifted teacher. An embryonic talented musician, gifted photographer, and poet of genius are readied for complete self-realisation. They are surrounded by an intelligentsia which consists not only of outstanding and brilliant but also of broken, dependent and intimidated people. The system oppresses all of them, the tough-minded and those who are pathetically weak.
Many cave in at the first pressure from the KGB (the unfortunate photographer does so and becomes an informer), but many others resist the oppressive ideological force and rescue both their physical life and, even more importantly, their conscience. The artist, in the footsteps of Tolstoy, leaves the city, where he faces arrest, for the forests and villages and dissolves in the depths of Russia. Alongside the heroes are a great diversity of women, strong or crushed, bitchy or tender, and magnificently witty. Almost all of them are extraordinary people and their actions too are extraordinary. They love their men in their own individual way, frequently helping and saving them, sacrificing themselves in the process without regret.
The life of one KGB general, the father of the main heroine, is amazing. All his life he has loved a woman he himself sent to the Gulag, and who, when she is released from the camps, forgives him and their love continues. Equally amazing is the story of a former prisoner, an intellectual who fled Nazi Germany and was subsequently incarcerated in a Soviet concentration camp. Emerging from prison, he makes a career as a leading Soviet psychiatrist and is instrumental in consigning the post-war dissidents to the lunatic asylum because, in accordance with the clinical classification and his formal examination, they are ‘factually psychologically unstable’.
As always with Ulitskaya, Imago is a novel about love, about destinies, and about characters. It is authentic psychological prose, but her new work is also broader than these definitions.
Ultimately this is a novel about failure to grow to maturity, failure to emerge fully from the cocoon, about people of the late 20th century living on the dynamism of adolescence but often, stuck in the phase of the run-up, never actually managing to take wing. Only a very few do attain the heights of which a human being is capable and which is most often achieved as the result of a magical indomitability, or through the agency of a creative profession, or the power of love.
Imago has a resonance and a reach which extends beyond the bounds of Russian literature. It is about all people of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is about the fact that in contemporary civilisation full maturity is almost never attained, especially if an individual who aspires to spread their wings and fly has some hobble, ideological or government-imposed, leaden and emasculating, weighing them down. Infantilism (or adolescence) is increasingly found in the modern world as a permanent condition, when the main features of a human being are present but have not ripened, have not found full expression. What should follow childhood is accomplished in a deformed manner or not accomplished at all. Adolescent civilisations form, in which people have ceased to mature. In this book Ulitskaya offers an innovative genre, a kind of anti-Bildungsroman, which will undoubtedly provide many people with food for thought and debate.
As always with this author, however, apart from the philosophical and moral charge, there is also emotional depth and wonderful artistry, a unique gift which renders her books accessible in dozens of languages to millions of readers. Only in her writing do we find that armour-piercing irony which enables episodes to pass, often in a single paragraph, from high tragedy to almost Shvejkian comedy. Imago is a very serious and very funny book.