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The Colonel Myasoedov Affair, a novel by Józef Mackiewicz
Original Polish title: SPRAWA PUŁKOWNIKA MIASOJEDOWA
Published by: France - NOIR SUR BLANC, Polish - Świderski, Wydawnictwo Klubów Mysli Robotniczej "Baza", Kontra; German - J. Pfeiffer; Romania - Casa Cartii de Stiinta, Spanish - Luis de Carait
The plot of The Colonel Myasoyedov Affair (1962) concerns the fate of Colonel Myasoyedov, a rather ordinary employee of the Russian state and private entrepreneur, who gets caught up in a complex web of events involving Russian-German spying activities, internecine battles between factions within the Okhrana (Russian secret police), and escalating tension between Germany and Russia as they work up towards the Great War. Eventually, Myasoyedov is accused of spying – via rumour, innuendo and disinformation – and is sentenced to death, partly on anti-Semitic grounds: he has been involved with a Jewish company which does shipping business between Germany and Russia, and has been protected by an aristocratic patron within the intelligence services, who is an anti-anti-Semite. (One of the more fascinating scenes in the novel is a description of a pogrom in Kiev in 1905, and all the different interests involved in stoking it, and stopping its course.) Once Myasoyedov is executed (in 1915), the novel's point of view shifts to his widow, Clara, who finds herself pursued by the rumours about her husband all the way up to WWII, and who eventually decides to flee the Soviet sphere with her second husband, and ends up witnessing the 1945 firebombing of Dresden. It is a kind of Russian "Dreyfuss affair", but much more interesting and with a larger historical panorama.
"Mackiewicz is a first-rate writer, with a wonderful sense of character, a gift for dialogue, and a strong narrative instinct. ... He has a deeply informed historical intelligence, and a powerful sense of the hidden connections between causes of events, and their sometimes much later consequences. The writing is marked by an appealing naturalness, as it moves from scenes of personal life and relationships, and the broader political and historical panorama." -- Eva Hoffman, the author of Lost in Translation
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Yermo, a novel by Yuri Buida (1997, 2011)
Rights are handled on behalf of Editions Gallimard
Rights sold: France – Gallimard, Russia - Vagrius
With Yermo, Yuri Buida signs a breathtaking novel in which he develops his reflection about literary creation mingling biography, aesthetic essay and thoughts about the novelistic style.
Life of the American writer George Yermo forms an extraordinary romantic material. Georgi Nikolaev-Yermo was born in 1914 in St. Petersburg into a family of the Russian nobles. He was raised in New Salem, MA, under the sign of Melville, Emily Dickinson and Henry James (all three New Englanders) and Puritan values of the US Founding Fathers. After graduating from University, he’s experienced an unhappy love affair, and went to the Spanish Civil War as a reporter. His battlefield articles made him famous.
In the early fifties, an accidental visit to the palace Sanseverino in Venice changes a course of Yermo’s life, as he suddenly recognizes a materialization of the house from his childhood dreams. The palace, its past and its secrets, and its beautiful owner Lisa, will from now on be the center of his life.
Buida’s Yermo is a broad reflection about literary fiction, and a beautiful homage to Vladimir Nabokov. The book is written in rich, abundant language, and contains protagonist’s (and author’s) views of art in general, of painting, theater and film, of philosophy and aesthetics, and of Russian and American literature. But it is the fascinating originality of its main character that makes Buida’s novel a real reading delicatessen.
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