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Conversation in the Rooms. Karamzin, Chaadayev, Herzen, and the Beginning of Modern Russia. Collected essays by Kirill Kobrin, 2018
Rights sold: Russia – NLO
This Kobrin's book is dedicated to a modernisation of Russian society in 19 century. It is about a creation of a special verbal code within the Russian language, the one used until today to discuss the most important humanitarian issues: politics, culture, social affairs, questrions of morals and ethics. Three protagonists of Kobrin's essays are Nikolai Karamzin (first European Russian writer and historian), Peter Chaadaev (his "Philosophical Letters" written in French are still a cornerstone of any discussion about relations between Russia and the West), and Alexander Herzen (first Russian socialist, Karl Marx's rival in European communist and socialist movement of that time); thanks to their efforts, the very possibility of such discussions became possible. In his essays, Kobrin shows how the Russian society accepted and transformed the ideas of enlightenment and romanticism, and applied them to the pre-existing social struggles.
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The Night We Disappeared, a novel by Nikolai Kononov
Rights sold: Russia - INDIVIDUUM
This is a polyphonic novel ambitious both in terms of its literary quality and the issues it discusses: xenophobia, inequality, post-memory, the "right turn," and anarchy. It is, of course, also a book about a search for identity, both among individuals and within the territories of Eastern Europe, where inhabitants suffered over and over during social upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries. The novel is centered on a phenomenon of apatrides - people rejected by their homeland who - against their will - became citizens of the world.
The plot-lines of the three main characters in Kononov’s novel are all set between 1919 and 1951. All three are refugees from the Russian and Soviet empires: they are exiles, stateless persons. Even so, history gave each a chance to play their own role in history before, during, and after World War II. Their trauma and pain affect their descendants – our contemporaries – in unexpected and unpredictable ways.
A young woman – a teacher who was raised by a dedicated Marxist mother in the USSR in the 1930s – suddenly converts to Christianity while surviving the Nazi occupation in the city of Pskov during WWII. She later witnesses a lesbian relationship developing between two young schoolgirls in a refugee camp. A White Russian émigré pretends to be a Bolshevik spy, deceives the German military-intelligence service, then falls in love with an anarchist woman and tries to turn the theory of love’s powerlessness into reality. A German refugee suffers from a dissociative identity disorder because he is unable to cope with the fact that he had betrayed his parents while saving his own life.
The circumstances of the lives of these three characters are told in letters, diaries, and documents discovered by our contemporaries: one of them is a high school girl who openly expresses an outrage against the war in Ukraine, another is a student working on her dissertation on the history of anarchism in a London apartment, the third is a German who was recently released from prison after serving a sentence for committing murder in the heat of passion.
The Night We Disappeared is about an individual’s bewilderment when facing a changing world and its uncontrollable brute forces. It’s about the utter fiasco of existing social structures, and the urgent need for new forms and ways of social interaction.
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