Featured titles
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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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BEFORE AND DURING, a novel by Vladimir Sharov
Rights sold: China - PEKING UNIVERSITY PRESS, France - PHÉBUS, Italy - VOLAND, Serbia - UTOPIA, World English - DEDALUS
Set in a psychiatric clinic in Moscow in the long decades of late-Soviet stagnation, Before and During sweeps the reader away from its dismal surroundings on a series of fantastical excursions into the Russian past. The novel invokes real historical events and people (Tolstoy, Madame de Staël, Saint John of Kronstadt, Alexander Scriabin, and Stalin, among others), swirling them into a phantasmagoric alternative chronology. Stories germinate within other stories, unfolding in astonishing variations.
We meet Leo Tolstoy’s twin brother, eaten by the great writer in his mother’s womb, only to be born as Tolstoy’s ‘son’; the philosopher-hermit Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed that the common task of humanity was the physical resurrection of their ancestors; a self-replicating Madame de Staël who, during her second life, is carried through plague-ridden Russia in a glass palanquin and becomes Fyodorov’s lover; and the composer Alexander Scriabin, who preaches to Lenin on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Out of these intoxicating, darkly comic fantasies – all described in a serious, steady voice – Sharov seeks to retrieve the hidden connections and hidden strivings of the Russian past, its wild, lustful quest for justice, salvation and God.
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