Right in time for the Pyrkon Festival the second volume of Lada Luzina’s series WITCHES OF KYIV has been published by Insignis. Luzina attended the festival and was warmly welcomed by her Polish fans.
Julia Kissina is a renowned Ukrainian writer and artist living in Berlin and New York City. Her novel SPRINGTIME ON THE MOON is both a memoir of Kyiv and a coming-of-age story. A rebellious and visionary girl grows up in the milieu of the bourgeois Jewish intelligentsia in a high-rise building on the outskirts of Kyiv‘s old town.
“In addition to the surrealism of morbid images, it is the precise, often mercilessly mocking … language that makes “Spring on the Moon” an event… With Julia Kissina‘s novel, Kyiv has become a place that from now on has its place on the mytho-poetic map of Eastern Europe.“
NEUE ZÜRCHER ZEITUNG
“Springtime on the Moon» is often studiedly amusing, but the attempt to take more than light fiction from her own memories lends Kissina’s book a Nabokovian dimension… As funny as Kaminer and as serious as Nabokov.“
SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
Already 6 years ago in his book THE PUTIN SYSTEM, author Igor Eidman, cousin of the murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was asking the following questions: Is the whole world about to experience a long period of instability and social and political regression? Is Europe facing the threat of a major war?
This book was (and still is) an SOS from a Russian expert. He has lived through the end of democracy in his own country and he sees the need to warn readers outside Russia of the comparable risks facing their own countries. In a new preface and epilogue the author is now reflecting the Russian aggression March 2022.
For uncovering an in-house corruption scandal in the early 2010ths, Eidman lost his job and, seeing himself and his family under increased pressure, emigrated to Germany. He lives in Berlin.
THE ELTYSHEVS – L’ULTIMO DEGLI ELYSHEV published by Fazi Editore/ Italy in the translation by Claudia Zonghetti is probably Roman Senchin’s most famous novel.
Nikolai Eltyshev is a policeman on duty at a station with a sobering-up cell, the mother Valentina works as a librarian, her youngest son is in prison and the older one is just killing time at home. A completely normal Russian civil servant family. The Eltyshev’s village is THE village, provincial Russia with all of its brutal present day reality. The ruins of a past era, the breakdown of which Putin called the «greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century».
Oleg Pavlov’s famous trilogy TALES FROM THE LAST DAYS is set at the end of the era of the Soviet Union, but they do paint a fundamental picture of the situation in the Russian army, a situation that has scarcely improved since the time of the Soviet Union as one can see after one year war against Ukraine.
Oleg Pavlov’s NOTES OF A HOSPITAL RECEPTIONIST is the essence of the writer’s personal experiences from the times he has been working as a receptionist in a Moscow hospital, between 1994 and 1997. Published as a book nearly sixteen years later, this diary became a lyrical epic masterpiece, earning recognition and praise of both critics and readers. The book was awarded the Solzhenitsyn Prize.
Pavlov has passed away in 2018.
Putin’s war in Ukraine has been met by outrage and disbelief around the world. Since the start of the war, writers in Russia, Ukraine and the Russian diaspora have been expressing their opposition to the invasion. An international group of poets and translators have been collecting these poems as the Kopilka project.
DISBELIEF presents 100 of the most moving and hard-hitting of these poems by poets including Polina Barskova, Vladimir Druk, Tatiana Voltskaya, Mikhail Aizenberg and Tatiana Shcherbina. The collection has been edited by Julia Nemirovskaya.
“Captures the initial shock of the invasion, and the rage, shame, lament and prayer.“ TLS
“An astonishing book… a Noah’s Ark of an enterprise… These poems needed to be written, and they need to be read too.“ EAST-WEST REVIEW
The Soviet Union had imposed an exit ban on Slava Kurilov but this was not something he was able to come to terms with. In December 1974 he jumped overboard from a Soviet tourist steamship near the Philippines. Without food, drink or diving equipment, just goggles, a snorkel and flippers, he swam some 100 kilometers to the Philippine coast, spending three whole days ALONE IN THE OCEAN.
A book version of this historical narrative non-fiction about his famous escape from Russia came out in Hebrew and in Ukrainian. A much shortened adaptation as a children’s book was published in France.
Aleksei Ivanov’s new Siberian novel THE FIGHTING RIVERS shows Russia at the beginning of the 20th century as a rapidly developing country with a huge advanced river fleet, almost entirely in private hands. This entire complex economic massif was practically blown up by the tragedy of 1917. The main plot happens within one and a half years only, during the odyssey of the smuggler „Levshino“, who in the battles on the Kama River in 1918-1919 has enough time to fight for the Reds, the Whites, the Greens and for himself.
A novel about a seemingly distant war. But under the magnifying glass of Ivanov‘s prose we see a truth hidden deep within that extends to contemporary Russia.
Andrei Rubanov‘s novel THE WOODEN PEOPLE is one of the few in the horror genre where a (wooden) “homunculus” him- self tells the story of his life. In a kind of magical realism, we learn from his three hundred years of life, built as flashbacks within the action in the present and now, in which all the evil that weighs on him, as well as the new love that uplifts him, is approaching an inevitable culmination point.
The facts: After the christianization of Russia, the Orthodox Church banned all old Russian wooden sculptures of saints. During the Petrine period, almost all wooden figures were removed from the churches and destroyed: chopped up or burned.
The fiction: some statues, hidden by fanatical followers, escaped this „genocide“ and either came to life independently or were breathed into life by others in a secret ritual. These wooden people do not get sick, can see well in the dark, do not grow old and do not die, they can only burn or die of an unhealed crack.