Featured titles
-
Russian Marmalade, collected plays by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2005)
Rights sold: France - GALLIMARD, Germany - HENSCHEL, Russia - EKSMO, AST
Collection of plays for theater ("Russian Marmalade", "My Grandson Benjamin", and "The Seven Saints from Bruho Village").
Russian Marmalade is a play clearly created in dialogue with Anton Chekhov’s «Cherry Orchard». The play’s heroes live in the same kind of old house with the same cherry trees growing all around, only the cherries themselves get made into jam to be sold to provide the owners of the home with their sole means of survival. It is the end of the twentieth century and Russia has changed course yet again as the old system crumbles.
None of the doors close and the electricity does not always work, but mobile phones are busy ringing all the time. The sentimental Chekhovian girl in this play, it turns out, works round the clock for an erotic phone line, unsuspected, it seems, by her respectable parents. This time it is not old monarchist Russia that is crumbling, but the Soviet regime as it gives way to the Yeltsin years. The “new Russians” sell and resell their parents’ dacha, and the parents, pushed onto the sidelines of life, don’t know where to turn anymore. These unhappy tales are infused with philosophical dread and deep psychological analysis. Ulitskaya tells her tales as only she knows how – in a comic, almost grotesque tone, turning a melancholy play with a Chekhovian plot into a bright and buoyant comedy.
Read more... -
Sofichka, a novel by Fazil Iskander (1997)
Rights sold:
The novella is a third-person, realistic narrative describing the life story of the Abkhazian woman named Sofichka. Sofichka falls in love with the young Rouf, who is half Abkhazian and half Turkish. Sofichka's relatives scorn Rouf, but Sofichka marries him despite the family's opposition. She is a good wife and loves her husband dearly, but Rouf is hated by her kin, and her brother Nuri kills him. Sofichka refuses all advances and does not remarry, remaining true to her husband into old age. Moreover, she repudiates her brother Nuri who, time and again, begs her for forgiveness. In the end, she forgives Nuri but cannot forgive herself. She becomes depressed, believing that she has betrayed her husband, and then becomes ill, and dies. Like most of Iskander's early narratives 'Sofichka' is set in the environs of Chegem. The customs and the lore of the people there have changed little, but the humour and banter of Iskander's early prose have disappeared. Instead, sadness, adversity, and unhappiness prevail. The character of Sofichka, who embodies devotion and goodness, goes down in defeat, and it is juxtaposed with other characters who are jealous, greedy, and rapacious.
Read more...