ELKOST International literary agency - An evening with Ludmila Ulitskaya in St. Petersburg

An evening with Ludmila Ulitskaya in St. Petersburg, December 6, 2012, in the The Grand Hall of Saint Petersburg Philharmonia.

The Grand Hall has a capacity of 1500 seats. It is one of the best known music halls in Russia, where F.Lizst, H.Berlioz, R.Wagner, A.Dvořák, J.Sibelius, C.-A.Debussy, R.Strauss, S.Rachmaninoff, S.Prokofiev, D.Shostakovich, A.Scriabin, G.Mahler, A.Rubinstein, K.Schumann, P.Viardo, P.Sarasate, A.Schoenberg, I.Stravinsky, B.Bartok, P.Hindemith, and many others performed.

An evening with Ludmila Ulitskaya in St. Petersburg

Event poster

Ulitskaya reads excerpts from her autobiographical book Discarded Relics (AST, 2012)

Book signing

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Video of the event

The Colonel Myasoedov Affair, a novel by Józef Mackiewicz

Original Polish title: SPRAWA PUŁKOWNIKA MIASOJEDOWA

Rights status: available for all languages less Polish and French.

Published by: France - NOIR SUR BLANC, Polish - Świderski, Wydawnictwo Klubów Mysli Robotniczej "Baza", Kontra; German - J. Pfeiffer; Spanish - Luis de Carait

The plot of The Colonel Myasoyedov Affair (1962) concerns the fate of Colonel Myasoyedov, a rather ordinary employee of the Russian state and private entrepreneur, who gets caught up in a complex web of events involving Russian-German spying activities, internecine battles between factions within the Okhrana (Russian secret police), and escalating tension between Germany and Russia as they work up towards the Great War. Eventually, Myasoyedov is accused of spying – via rumour, innuendo and disinformation – and is sentenced to death, partly on anti-Semitic grounds: he has been involved with a Jewish company which does shipping business between Germany and Russia, and...

Escape Hatch & The Long Road Ahead: Two Novellas by Vladimir Makanin (1979)

Rights sold: Finland - SN-kirjat, France - BELFOND, Germany - Neuer Malik, Italy - Edizioni e/o, World English - ARDIS, Spain - Siruela, Sweden - NORSTEDTS,

Shertlisted for the 1992 Russian Booker Prize

The book, which contains two dystopian novellas (written in 1991), indicates that, directly or indirectly, Makanin has been influenced by Evgeny Zamyatin, the author of We, a book that anticipated in great detail Brave New World and 1984. (Actually, Zamyatin's a better writer than Huxley or Orwell, who both appropriated details of We's plot.)

Zamyatin and Makanin (born 1937) also share a background in science and mathematics. Zamyatin worked for a while as a naval engineer, in fact. In the novella Escape Hatch (Лаз), the protagonist, a mathematician named Klyucharyov, travels through a tunnel from a deteriorating aboveground city, where public order hardly exists, to an underground community where residents live comfortably and safely but seem on the edge of some crisis. The Long Road Ahead (Долог наш...

An evening with Ludmila Ulitskaya in St. Petersburg

Featured titles

The Colonel Myasoedov Affair, a novel by Józef Mackiewicz

Escape Hatch & The Long Road Ahead: Two Novellas by Vladimir Makanin (1979)