Featured titles
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Conversation in the Rooms. Karamzin, Chaadayev, Herzen, and the Beginning of Modern Russia. Collected essays by Kirill Kobrin, 2018
Rights sold: Russia – NLO
This Kobrin's book is dedicated to a modernisation of Russian society in 19 century. It is about a creation of a special verbal code within the Russian language, the one used until today to discuss the most important humanitarian issues: politics, culture, social affairs, questrions of morals and ethics. Three protagonists of Kobrin's essays are Nikolai Karamzin (first European Russian writer and historian), Peter Chaadaev (his "Philosophical Letters" written in French are still a cornerstone of any discussion about relations between Russia and the West), and Alexander Herzen (first Russian socialist, Karl Marx's rival in European communist and socialist movement of that time); thanks to their efforts, the very possibility of such discussions became possible. In his essays, Kobrin shows how the Russian society accepted and transformed the ideas of enlightenment and romanticism, and applied them to the pre-existing social struggles.
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A PERSON NOT TO BE TRUSTED, a novel by Vladislav Otroshenko (2010)
Rights sold: Italy – Voland, USA – The Literary Review (magazine rights), Russia – Limbus-press, Free Fly, CoLibri
Time and space, illusion and dream, world history and death are the main themes of Otroshenko's A Person Not to Be Trusted, where fantasy intertwines with reality, hoaxes and historical facts look just the same.
Literary critics sometime call Vladislav Otroshenko 'mystical realist' and 'postmodern writer', comparing his works to these of J.L.Borges, Italo Calvino, Gaite Gazdanova, and Milorad Pavić. At the same time, after Otrosheko's Person Not To Be Trusted was published in Italy (Voland, 1997), local journalists have dubbed the story 'philosophical mystery novel'.
Vladislav Otroshenko combined a rich, almost Gogolian prose style with Borgesian fantasy in his long-awaited volume of various genres of prose, entitled Persona vne dostovernosti (A Person Not to Be Trusted). (Thomas Epstein, The Literary Review)
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