Featured titles
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The Prussian Bride, collected stories by Yuri Buida (1998)
Rights are handled on behalf of Editions Gallimard
Rights sold: Estonia - Loomingu Raamat, France – Gallimard, Hungary – Kalligram, Poland – Czytelnik, Russia - NLO, EKSMO, AST, Slovakia – Kalligram, Spain - AUTOMATICA, UK/US – Dedalus
Apollon Grigoriev Prize 1999
Rossica Translation Prize 2005 (translation by Oliver Ready)
The Prussian Bride, unfolds a strange hodge podge of blunt fiction and fantastical hallucination. The action in the thirty short stories of the collection takes place in the area of Kaliningrad, where the writer was born back in 1954. The writer depicts the daily life of forlorn, mortified, alcoholic or sick locals who are haunted by the fantasy of a lost paradise. Dark and tragic accounts sliding along from rational to imaginary.
Each of Yuri Buida’s short stories gathered here explore the territory between the Vistula and Niemen which once used to be eastern Prussia. The myth of a glorious past left its marks in the Kaliningrad area, he former Königsberg, but its inhabitants’ daily life is cold, dark and violent. Material and emotial misery is rampant, and violence is not only physical. The tone of this anthology, dedicated to the memory of a territory is absolutely tragic. Several recurring characters appear in this collection of thirty short stories, so that it can almost read like a novel. It definitely brings to mind the romanticism of E.T.A Hoffman, sprinkled with Russian excessiveness. “Chapters” in Buida’s novel display a wide variety of genres and styles, from fantasy and the grotesque to a stern (even cruel) realism. The author demonstrates plot ingenuity and a masterful use of shock effects.
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The Witness, a novel by Ilya Mitrofanov (1993)
Rights sold: Germany - Volk und Welt, Italy - Isbn Edizioni, Spain - Lumen, Poland - Claroscuro
"This novel is intensely passionate, and rich in fresh images and patterns..." (Silvia Bambino, The Wanity Fair)
"The Witness" is the first-person narrative of the life story of a simple human being, a barber Fedor Petrovich, whose life's most intense and dramatic period was the incorporation of his native Bessarabia into the Soviet Union in 1940, accompanied by coercion from the new command structure, which affected social relationships and caused enormous suffering due to famine brought on both by prolonged drought and by mistakes in official planning and preparation.
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In the speck on the map called Kotlovina, the entire historical drama, starting with the so-called Soviet liberation from Romanian rule, was played out to its horrible end with very few survivors to live and tell about it.
The novel's success is based on the vivid and laconic presentation of its characters. "The Witness" projects the speech pattern of a simple, uneducated man. This style makes use of down-to-earth expressions, is unafraid of repetitions, takes notice of the simple things in life (of a person's outward appearance, of smells and fragrances, all very appropriate to a barber's profession), is not averse to rudeness in language and behavior, and above all is a stranger to all dissembling and pretense. The events told are viewed through the prism of recollection, which softens their horrible contours somewhat and which allows the theme of brotherhood to emerge and feelings of hatred to dissolve. Honesty and lack of pretense are the author's hallmark, and it is these features which characterize his artistic expression.