Mikhail Vizel – Pushkin in Quarantine

new representation

nothing resembles our year 2020 more than Pushkin‘s quarantine of 1830

Cholera is raging in Russia and parts of the country are in lockdown. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, already famous at the time, is stuck in Boldino for three months. The planned wedding with his fiancée Natalia Goncharova has to be postponed. He tries twice in vain to get to her in Moscow. Pushkin is worried. And with jealousy that the bride might jump off him. He is furious because, despite bribing the police, he is unable to bypass the roadblocks to Moscow.

Mikhail Vizel in his book PUSHKIN.BOLDINO.QUARANTINE reconstructs the exciting chronology of the Boldino autumn in a witty, amusing and analytically accurate way. Commenting letters from Pushkin to his bride, we are introduced to his love affair, which has to pass an extraordinary stress test during lockdown. We can not only chronologically follow Pushkin‘s passionate ups and downs during quarantine, but finally experience them with compassion based on our own Covid experience.

Aleksandr Grigorenko – Mebet

new publication

English translation published by Glagoslav

The first part of Aleksandr Grigorenko’s novel MEBET seems to take the reader off into an ethnic epic about a great hunter and warrior with all the myths of the Taiga: witches, talking dogs, huge bears, hoards of spirits. Yet the second part reveals itself as a grandiose literary reflection of the first and we realise that this no folklore novel, but a timeless novel about destiny and humanity, culminating in a powerful, universal catharsis.