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In Love with a Pencil, essays by Sasha Okun (NF)
Rights sold: Russia - SLOVO
The book was created as a textbook on pencil drawing techniques for beginners and professionals, but it is in fact something much more broad and interesting than just a manual on drawing. It is rather a manual on artistic perception of reality.
"All great masters of the past regardless of their main craft, be it sculpture or painting, were great draftsmen: Rubens, Rembrandt, Matisse, Picasso, Moore, Rodin... Drawing is the foundation, the cornerstone of any visual art. There's an endless amount of books and manuals about the art of drawing. Among them, there are bad, good, and very good ones. The question is, why write yet one more? The fact is that regardless of their quality, all of these books answer the question "how"? Some of them are even entitled "How to draw a portrait (landscape, model, still life, hands, etc.)." However, in my humble opinion, every "how" depends on"what" and "why". These "what" and "why" define the "how" on every stage of creative process, from initial choice of format to the techniques used to achieve the desired result.This book is an attempt to discuss a multitude of drawing-related issues from the point of view of artistic goals set by draftsmen, to take a look at artistic techniques and devices not as of something that exist abstractly and independently, but as of instruments, of means for achieving the goal, and of means that are an integral part of this goal, because in visual art "what" and "how" are inseparable.Still, any book regardless of its genre - be it a textbook, a memoir, a novel, or a tour guide - should fist and foremost make an interesting read. As Alexandre Dumas put it once, "all genres are good, except the boring." This commandment of the great novelist and culinary specialist is more important to me than purity of the genre. So, there a bit of everything in my book: analysis of the works by great masters of the past, practical advice, reflections, memories, anecdotes, and my thoughts about art accumulated over more than forty years I've been teaching people to draw." - writes Okun in a preface to In Love with a Pencil.
Surprisingly, the book conceived as a drawing manual turned out to be a tutorial on the vision of the world in all its diversity. Of course, this book will be extremely valuable and useful to artists, especially for beginners. But at the same time, it will be of use to everyone seeking to expand his general vision of life. Today's literary market is like a food store where dairy, meat, fruits, and booze each belong to its department. Same with books: there are a separate shelves for fiction, educational literature, philosophy, technical books etc. Everything is sorted out by its genre. Okun's book is rare product, a piece that does not fit into one single category, but to many. For publisher, such a non-standard books is a great challenge, but for readers it’s a rare joy. -- Ludmila Ulitskaya
Original languages: Hebrew, Russian. Around 55.000 words, color illustrations.
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THE DIARY OF A GULAG PRISON GUARD by Ivan Chistyakov (1934-1936, NF)
Rights sold: Czech Republic – EUROMEDIA, Estonia - ARGO, France – DeNoël, Germany - MSB Matthes & Seitz, Italy - Pearson Paravia (Bruno Mondadori), Netherlands - Ambo | Anthos Uitgevers, Poland - BELLONA, Russia - CORPUS, World English - GRANTA, US - PEGASUS
Ivan Chistyakov’s diary is unique historical testimony. He commanded an armed guard unit on a section of BAM, the Baikal-Amur Railway which was built by forced labour.
We have few memoirs written even by people on the outside of the barbed wire. This diary, written inside the Gulag, gives a day by day account of life there over several months in 1935-36 and is probably unique.
The original diary is in the safekeeping of the Memorial human rights centre in Moscow which, since the late 1980s, has been collecting documents, testimony, memoirs, and letters relevant to the history of political repression in the USSR. It was passed to them by people who had come upon it among the papers left by a distant female relative.
The diary consists of two medium-sized exercise books. One describes three days in August 1934 which Chistyakov spent hunting, before being conscripted into the interior troops and sent to BAM. His notes are reminiscent of Ivan Turgenev’s classic A Hunter’s Sketches, illustrated by the author. They suggest nostalgia for the old, pre-revolutionary Russia and are in total contrast to the other notebook, which was written in 1935-36 when Chistyakov was working in the Gulag.
We do not know where Ivan Chistyakov was in 1939 when, along the railway built by the labour of prisoners he had guarded in 1935-36, long echelons of wagons passed bearing new prisoners to BAM. Among them was one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets, Nikolai Zabolotsky.
It is a miracle that Chistyakov’s diary, whose entries break off, probably, with his arrest, somehow survived, that it did not fall into the hands of NKVD officials, that it was not discarded and destroyed, and that somebody managed to send it to Moscow.
Thanks to this miracle, one more voice of a lonely man who lived in a fearful era has come down to us.
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