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A Russian Story
He is young, intelligent, well educated, with patriotic sentiments. But certain misunderstandings oblige him to flee from Ukraine. For some reason, everything in his life builds up to a certain Russian scenario. So to what extent should one burden Ukrainians with the outcome of this Russian Story? Finding himself involuntarily identified with Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the hero of the novel, Eugene Samarsky, becomes a 'superfluous man' in Ukraine. The novel by Eugenia Kononenko deals with love and the quest for one’s own identity, with the vaguely remembered circumstances rendering life nonsensical in Ukraine during the last years of the empire and the early years of independence. It considers the possibility of a mid-Atlantic meeting in today's globalised world.
Voices
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Depeche Mode
In 1993, tragic turbulence takes over Ukraine in the post-communist spin-off. As if in somnambulism, Soviet war veterans and upstart businessmen listen to an American preacher of whose type there were plenty at the time in the post-Soviet territory. In Kharkiv, the young communist headquarters is now an advertising agency, and a youth radio station brings Western music, with Depeche Mode in the lead, into homes of ordinary people. In the middle of this craze three friends, an anti-Semitic Jew Dogg Pavlov, an unfortunate entrepreneur Vasia the Communist and the narrator Zhadan, nineteen years of age and unemployed, seek to find their old pal Sasha Carburetor to tell him that his step-father shot himself dead. Characters confront elements of their reality, and, tainted with traumatic survival fever, embark on a sad, dramatic and a bit grotesque adventure.
Goodbye, Bird
For a twenty-eight-year-old young man who returned from the army several years ago but has yet to reacclimatize to ordinary life, every step, gesture, word, and vision is a revelation, which takes him back to the beginning, to a time when reality had lost its shape, and turned into a new and imperceptible world. In his imagination, he embodies a number of different characters, he feels the presence of his girlfriend again, and remembers friends from his childhood and from the army, who are now gone. This is a book of questions, and the answers to these questions are to be found by the reader. The novel is like a puzzle which needs to be pieced together, and the picture is not complete until the last piece is in place, until the last word of the book has been read. Translated from the Armenian by Nairi Hakhverdi.
Absolute Zero
The book is a first person account of a soldier’s journey, and is based on Artem Chekh’s diary that he wrote while and after his service in the war in Donbas. One of the most important messages the book conveys is that war means pain. Chekh is not showing the reader any heroic combat, focusing instead on the quiet, mundane, and harsh soldier’s life. Chekh masterfully selects the most poignant details of this kind of life.
Leonardo’s Handwriting
Leonardo’s Handwriting is a romantic morality tale, with an unconventional woman at its heart. Nature has given the heroine, Anna, the gift of clairvoyance, and it is this that determines her singular fate. The characteristic “left-handed mirror handwriting”, which in psychology came to be known as “Leonardo’s handwriting” (since that’s how the Renaissance genius wrote his notes), simply adds to the “weirdness” both of Anna’s personality and the twists and turns of the novel. Is the divine gift of prophecy a blessing or a curse? And how is it possible to withstand the burden of such an astonishing gift? This is also a novel about love: a strong, noble, tragic love, love, ...
The Vow
Can something that exists merely as a literary text, say a story, come about in real life? Can reality, to put it another way, steal something from literature, the same way literature steals from reality? Such is the question that Libor Hrach, the author of The Adventures of the Wise Badger, fields one evening over a hedonistic supper in a tony Brno restaurant from Kamil Modráček, himself a burrowing animal of sorts, in Jiří Kratochvil’s novel The Vow. ‘Quite simply, I said, everything that has been written either has already happened, or is about to. You write a story, and you can never be sure if what you’re writing isn’t actually taking place two streets away from where you si...
Hardly Ever Otherwise
Painting a tortured picture of life’s harsh brutality in the region, Maria provides an insight into the complicated history of this remote corner of the Carpathian Mountains. Against the colourful backdrop of local traditions and highlanders’ rites she weaves her story of love, intertwined with a heart wrenching human tragedy, not avoiding intimate details of the anatomy of relationships between men and women. Enchanted by the impeccable style of this family saga, the reader becomes baffled by the character’s actions. In the words of Maria Matios the book is about people’s deeply concealed nature. When familiar passions like love and hate, joy and envy overcome them and it’s not in their nature to resist, consequences reach the catastrophic magnitude. Each character is flawed, detestable, but in the book’s finale they incite compassion as their painful past is steadily revealed. The eternal dilemma of sin and atonement pervades the pages of this book. The author does not shy away from carnal encounters and masterfully describes the psychology of lovers, accentuating people’s struggles on different levels.
The Door Was Open
The short fiction of Karine Khodikyan can be described as intellectual fiction for women. These short stories with a “mystical touch” tell stories about women – young and old, happy and sad; even when the protagonist is not a woman, the story will immerse you into the life of a woman, revealing her role in anything and everything. This book was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia under the “Armenian Literature in Translation” Program.
The Code of Civilization
In his book, Vyacheslav Nikonov shows the origins of the modern world and traces the chronologies and histories of peoples and countries. Nikonov discusses the main centers of influence and forces that shape the world in which we live. The world demonstrates a variety of development models shaped by the national, regional, historical, religious and other aspects of each country. The center of gravity of world development is shifting from West to East, from North to South, from developed economies to developing ones. Thirty years ago, Western countries accounted for 80% of the world economy; now it is less than half. Asia, already home to most of humanity, will become a global leader in the coming decades. What does this mean? What will the world be like and what place will Russia take in it? Will American hegemony continue? Will China become a superpower? Will Europe become a museum for tourists from other continents? History has resumed its course and the world is rushing towards an unstoppable diversity. Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.
