Monat: November 2022

FICTION by Aleksei Ivanov
THE GEOGRAPHER DRANK THE GLOBE – In the Russian province of the 90s a young teacher fights with the children of the new generation. He has been assigned to the most rebellious class. The „geography teacher“ and the teenagers, who are ready to break him, first sit in the walls of the classroom, but then outside the walls they together experience an adventure of comradeship and initiation.

„Geographer“ pumps new blood into the channels of emotional perception through literature and lets many readers again – lite- rally as the first time – feel very simple and familiar things: winter, love, wind, trust, lone- liness, the smell of cigarette smoke, the taste of vodka, the headache of a hangover.“ GALINA YUZEFOVICH

NONFICTION by Aleksei Ivanov
1) THE MINING CIVILIZATION – The economic potential of mining equipment gave rise to a new and unprecedented cultu- ral phenomenon, dubbed by 20th-century sociologists as the „mining civilization.“ This is a variant of the Russian world, but with a special value system, with a special mythology, with special culture heroes. And the identity of Russian mining and metallurgy, which is also the identity of the Urals, turned out to be the benchmark for its industrialization.

2) RIDGE OF RUSSIA – Russians have settled in the Urals for half a millennium, but also the Urals the Urals have been fitting the immigrants for five centuries. Thus arose in the Urals quite an amazing world, unlike the Russian one, with a complex set of local ideas about nature and man. In everyday life it is difficult to understand how the Urals differ from Russia ¬ and yet remain Russia. In any case, the fact is that the world of the Urals is not an alternative to the Russian world, but one of its versions.

Viktor Martinovich’s mind crushing novel about Minsk in the year 2044, when it became a provincial town in the north-west of the United States of China and Russia. Family and love are considered to be out-dated concepts, spiritual needs are fulfilled by consuming and advertising. Despite draconian punishments a particular drug somehow and repeatedly manages to get into the country: MOVA. Anyone who reads the mova note, hardly understands a word, but experiences a wonderfully euphoric high. Chinese triads, Belarusian underground insurgents and the national narcotics control office are tangled up in a drug war. Or is there more to it than meets the eye?

Blackout in Central Europe. No more electricity, water is only available by the hour, due to a change in the atmosphere, oil and coal do not burn anymore, even compasses do not work. Minsk has disintegrated into clans that are in part fighting. About what happens outside the city limits, circulate only terrible rumors. The end of a suicidal world in which technology has overtaken ethics.

Aleksei Nikitin’s novel BAT-AMI is not a documentary novel, but its story – inspired in part by the author‘s family history – is based on files relating to 1941-1942 secret service operations from the archives of the Ukrainian Secret Service. These sources enabled the author to tell the true story of the famous boxer Goldinov. Because the widespread theories about what happened to him – the rumours that were still circulating in Kyiv after the war – have largely proven to be false, as has old Yad Vashem version of events. The descriptions of Ukraine’s complex conflicts involving an overpowering Russian brother state, the Soviet secret service, German occupation, partisans and patriotic nationalist freedom fighters cast their shadows even onto the Ukraine of today.