Featured titles
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RAISING LAZARUS, a novel by Vladimir Sharov
Rights sold: Russia - VAGRIUS, ARSIS BOOKS, Serbia - UTOPIA
Through a patchwork of letters and second hand memoirs, the novel follows the lives of two brothers in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the brothers, Fyodor, is a bishop-turned-religious-sectarian. The other brother, Nikolai, is obsessed with the idea of reuniting Russian society in the years after the Russian Civil War. As Raising Lazarus progresses, Nikolai becomes interested in esoteric doctrines that promise to transcend ideological conflicts. The reader soon learns through letters written by Nikolai, that he believes that Christ must return to Earth for salvation to be bestowed on Russia and we see a blending of the Christian and Bolshevik expectations for an “end of history.” Nikolai then begins to believe that only truly terrible human conditions can cause the arrival of the Messiah. This time, Sharov’s mixing of religious and communist beliefs was praised by critics because of Sharov’s clever use of symbolism. Raising Lazarus has sold over 10,000 copies in Russian.
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The Book of Legendary Lands - 2013
Rights sold: Russia - SLOVO
Places that have never existed except in the human imagination may find an incongruous afterlife in the everyday world. Umberto Eco tells of how an attempt to commemorate the brownstone New York home of Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout’s orchid-loving fictional detective, runs up against the resistance of fact. Wolfe’s house cannot be identified because Stout “always talked of a brownstone at a certain number on West 35th Street, but in the course of his novels he mentioned at least ten different street numbers – and what is more, there are no brownstones on 35th Street”. Using Eco’s typology, a fiction has been transmuted into a legend: “Legendary lands and places are of various kinds and have only one characteristic in common: whether they depend on ancient legends whose origins are lost in the mists of time or whether they are in effect a modern invention, they have created flows of belief.” (from John Gray's review on English-language edition, full text http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/11/no-place-home)
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