ELKOST International literary agency - Russian CULTURE TV channel presents a documentary about Ludmila Ulitskaya

http://tvkultura.ru/brand/show/brand_id/38825

Directed by Elena Yakovitch, 2013

Featured titles

Kyiv. A Fortress Over the Abyss, collected essays by Elena Kostioukovitch (2025, NF)

Rights sold: France – NOIR SUR BLANC, Italia – LA NAVE DI TESEO, Spain – TUSQUETS, Ukraine – FOLIO

Part historical treatise, part autobiographical narrative, and part literary review, Kyiv. A Fortress Over the Abyss is a profound exploration of Ukraine and its capital. Through a multifaceted lens that intertwines history, literature, culture, and personal memories, Elena Kostioukovitch guides readers through her hometown Kyiv revealing a city shaped by conflict yet defined by resilience.

The book traces Kyiv’s turbulent history, from the Mongol invasions to the devastation of the Russian Revolution, and now the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. Despite centuries of hardship, Kyiv endures, upheld by the strength and perseverance of its people.

Kyiv: A Fortress Over the Abyss offers a captivating journey through the city’s history, folklore, and literary heritage. Devided into three major parts — Kyiv’s Places, its Lights, and its Voices — it invites readers to uncover the essence of this extraordinary city, immersing themselves in its indomitable spirit.

Confessions of a Young Novelist, 2011

Rights sold: Russia - Corpus, Estonia - Tanapaev,

Umberto Eco published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, in 1980, when he was nearly fifty. In these “confessions,” the author, now in his late seventies, looks back on his long career as a theorist and his more recent work as a novelist, and explores their fruitful conjunction.

He begins by exploring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction—playfully, seriously, brilliantly roaming across this frontier. Good nonfiction, he believes, is crafted like a whodunnit, and a skilled novelist builds precisely detailed worlds through observation and research. Taking us on a tour of his own creative method, Eco recalls how he designed his fictional realms. He began with specific images, made choices of period, location, and voice, composed stories that would appeal to both sophisticated and popular readers. The blending of the real and the fictive extends to the inhabitants of such invented worlds. Why are we moved to tears by a character’s plight? In what sense do Anna Karenina, Gregor Samsa, and Leopold Bloom “exist”?

At once a medievalist, philosopher, and scholar of modern literature, Eco astonishes above all when he considers the pleasures of enumeration. He shows that the humble list, the potentially endless series, enables us to glimpse the infinite and approach the ineffable. This “young novelist” is a master who has wise things to impart about the art of fiction and the power of words.