Featured titles
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Kira Georgievna, a novel by Victor Nekrasov (1961)
Published by: Croatia - Svjetlost (1963); Czech Republic - SNKLU (1962); Denmark - Kbh (1962); France - Seuil (1963); Germany - Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (1962), Ullstein Verlag (1981); Italy - Einaudi (1961); Israel - משרד הבטחון; Poland - Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy (1961); Slovakia - Slovenské vydavatelstvo krásnej literatúry (1962); Spain - Editorial Mateu (1962); UK - Cresset Press (1963), Cambridge University Press (1967); USA - Pantheon Books (1962),
Set in 1960's Russia, the novel tells the story of Kira Georgievna, a middle-aged successful sculptor, passively married to Nikolai, a much older painter. Each completely engrossed in their work, they become entirely emotionally detached from one another. At this point we meet Vadim, the man Kira was engaged to marry twenty-five years earlier. Their plan was destroyed upon Vadim's arrest by the Solviet police, which earned him a twenty-year sentence in Siberia. Now married with a five-year-old son, his curiosity leads him back to Kira. They fall in love all over again and plan to start a new life, but complications naturally arise when they realize the sacrifices that must be made in order to be together.
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Get Lost, Crocodile, a novel by Marina Vishneventskaya (2002)
In Vishnevetskaya’s Came the Moon out of Mist and Get Lost, Crocodile! the search for female identity is formulated as a drama in the genre of lyric parable. The heroines question what it means to “be a woman” in the contradicting societal ideologies of the post-Soviet epoch. The distorted implementation of the laws of capitalist consumption often does not coincide with the patriarchal model of the family, which, in turn, is discredited by cynical views of the Soviet citizen. According to Vishnevetskaya, the heroine can be “freed from the spell,” in other words reveal her essence, or “extinguish”— erase that which is overly incomprehensible. These metaphysical operations either unearth the woman’s essence, or turn her into an automaton. Notably, revealing the trapped female essence or vice versa, repressing it is carried out not so much by the external world, not by the man whom she chose as a lover or who chose her, but by the woman herself.
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