ELKOST International literary agency - JUST PUBLISHED: Viktor Shklovsky's Sentimental Journey, ZOO, and The Third Factory in Poland

Viktor Shklovsky's documentary novels Zoo or Letters Not About Love, Sentimental Journey, and Third Factory released in Poland by Wydawnictwo Sedno in one volume as Jeszcze nie wszystko skończone...

Przekład autobiograficznej trylogii Wiktora Szkłowskiego Podróż sentymentalna. Wspomnienia 1917–1922 (1923); ZOO. Listy nie o miłości albo Trzecia Heloiza (1923) oraz Trzecia fabryka (1926) na podstawie rosyjskiej edycji ich nieocenzurowanych wydań. We wspomnieniach z końcowych lat I wojny światowej oraz rewolucji i wojny domowej w Rosji a następnie pobytu autora na emigracji w Berlinie wątki osobiste przeplatają się z wydarzeniami historycznymi różnego porządku: militarnymi, politycznymi i kulturalnymi. Pamięci faktów towarzyszy w nich fikcja literacka, „pełna wiarygodność z ostentacyjną fikcją” mieszają się swobodnie i celowo, opatrywane autoironicznym komentarzem autora pozbawionego wszelkich złudzeń, któremu „znudzia się i mądrość, i ironia”. Uczestnik i zarazem wnikliwy obserwator życia artystycznego, intelektualnego i politycznego czasów przełomu, żołnierz armii carskiej i republiki powstałej po obaleniu caratu, świadek katastrofy i klęski wojennej Rosji oraz krwawych i okrutnych wydarzeń rewolucji i wojny domowej, początkowo przeciwnik bolszewików, następnie – po powrocie z emigracji – przez 60 lat „żył, jak się dało, ale z radziecką motywacją”.

Featured titles

Experiences, collected stories by Marina Vishneventskaya

Rights sold: Germany – DTV (anthology rights), France – ACTES SUD, FAYARD (anthology rights), Italy – DI RENZO, AVAGLIANO (anthology rights), Hungary – GABO (anthology rights), USA – COLORADO (anthology rights)

The problematics of female introspection reaches in Vishnevetskaya’s Experiences its climactic concentration. These unhappy allegorical stories, told in the first person, depict subsidiary and “background” characters, marginal individuals belonging to various social and age groups. The title of each novella in the book corresponds to the initials of the “narrator,” which usually remain undeciphered, and a hinting phrase about a unique experience, which she or he will be sharing with the reader. Structurally, each piece is reminiscent of a confessional monologue about a certain traumatic or healing encounter, which through the process of revelation — or overcoming of the self — construes the female identity in its completeness. Almost all of Vishnevetskaya’s descriptions of mundane experiences —grievance, hope, attraction, parting, monotony, etc. — can be summarized under one encompassing experience of “discovering the self.”

The most intense piece in this text, The Experience of Love, was lauded by critics and received prestigious awards in 2003. A paralyzed woman, dying from cancer and placed in a sanatorium by her relatives, is taping the story of her meager and ordinary biography.

The association between the masculine gaze and the feminine image, which has been the basis of various literary schemes and feminist theories, is treated in a curious way in The Experience of Not Partaking. In an ironic, detached voice the narrator describes his interaction with women as Japanese minimalism —he neither touches nor speaks to them — just exchanges glances. By casting a meticulously terrorizing gaze that forces a woman to freeze in either awe or inexplicable horror, he pulls her into an unfair game, one that she has already lost.

In Vishnevetskaya’s prose the sensitive and ineluctable experiences of separation and breakups appear as fundamental elements in constructing the female subjectivity. In The Experience of Other and The Experience of Disappearing, two completely dissimilar heroines — an old village woman, whose husband was killed years ago and who finds out that her sister’s children were conceived from him, and a young city girl who must reject her lover and whose mother’s clinical schizophrenia is a biological threat to her offspring—are going through an identical experience: the discovery of a certain void (or, psychoanalytically speaking, a trauma), which occurs at the moment of either affected or self-inflicted loss of a loved one. Moreover, the days and years that accumulate from this moment don’t ease the unwanted traumatic effects, but carve the very essence of the woman’s character. Such irreducible themes give Vishnevetskaya’s prose an edge and contemporaneity.

The black humor of The Experience of Demonstrating Grievance definitely stands out from the uniformly lyric tone of the book, enriching its stylistic qualities. The grotesqueness of the story is rendered through the ridiculously difficult process of choosing a proper dress that will emphasize the heroine’s femininity and attractiveness.

Vishnevetskaya’s Experiences — based on readership success and awards — is one of the most persuasive and compelling instances in the arena of contemporary Russian women’s prose. - Context Literary Magazine

Palisandria (Astrophobia), a novel by Sasha Sokolov (1985)

Rights sold: Czech Republic – PROSTOR, Italy - ATMOSPHERE LIBRI, Russia – AZBOOKA, OGI, USA – GROVE WEIDENFELD

"An enchanting, tragic, and touching work." - VLADIMIR NABOKOV

"A book of rare depth, ...wildly funny and oddly fascinating and sad; it is the sort of book you feel sorry to close after the last page." - TATYANA TOLSTAYA

"It will undoubtedly come to be recognized as one of the great classics of Russian prose." — Newsweek

"The voice is amazingly sensitive and imaginative, gloriously lucid of language and full of broad comedy and whimsical wit." — The Washington-Post Book World

"Sokolov [is] already, on the strength of A School for Fools, assured of a place in the pantheon of twentieth-century Russian literature... He is a prose poet who combines, to a rare degree, linguistic precision, imaginative boldness, and wit in its profounder sense—the intellectual faculty that directs a penetrating, pencil-thin shaft of light on that elusive point where absurdity and sadness meet." — Voice Literary Supplement

"A lyrical vision of extraordinary intensity..." — Chicago Daily News

"There is no other book in Russian Literature that is perfect stylistically and conceptually, and is capable of simultaneously arousing a lucky reader in the middle of the night and making him laugh as loud as never before; and marvelling at the true wisdom of some or maybe all of the statements in the book... The Nobel-worthy Palisandria by Sasha Sokolov is a pleasure to read, unlike the overrated pompous loads by such bores as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn. Sokolov finally shows that you do not have to sport a mass of facial hair and preach about Russian "soul" to be truly a writer of genius." (amazon.com)