Foreigners gathered under this cover. Some by passport, some by spirit, and some simply too flamboyant for this world. Meryl Streep and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alla Pugacheva and Jean Cocteau, Vera Polozkova and Greta Garbo. And also Audrey Hepburn, Margarita Terekhova, Andrey Danilko, Renata Litvinova... They have one thing in common: they are ‘different,’ they ‘didn't fit in’—and so they...

Before emigrating, she participated in saving the Solzhenitsyn Archive after his arrest, miraculously escaping repression herself. In exile, she worked for the renowned Ardis publishing house and was a BBC journalist during its golden age. In perestroika-era Moscow, she witnessed and participated in the era of free speech... Masha Slonim's long-awaited memoir is a spy thriller, a dramatic...

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is someone who knows how to work with chaos. She's known it since her hungry childhood during the war. Today, the girl who sang in the courtyards of Kuibyshev for bread is a celebrated writer, and people call her ‘great.’ But today, Petrushevskaya says, ‘There Is No Time.’ That's the title she gave to her book, which she's long wanted to compile from the texts of an...

Kirill Kobrin is a writer, historian, journalist, or, as he puts it, ‘a European writer and historian writing in Russian.’ His heroes include Wenceslas Hollar, Franz Kafka, Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Mann, Edward Gibbon, the author himself, and all of us who unfortunately found ourselves in this time and place.

The book ‘Deal with the Devil: German-Russian Relations between the First and Second World Wars’ is a compact and extremely engaging presentation of the history of the Russian and German peoples, filled with events of historic proportions. With captivating dynamism and literary precision, Sebastian Hafner describes the twists and turns in relations between nations that sometimes fought each...

‘The Biggest Ferris Wheel’ is a novel-autofiction in which real life, resembling fiction, blends with fantasy, resembling life. Simple and bright stories from life, brief love affairs that never developed into anything more, the painful experience of war, encounters with people identified by initials of varying degrees of obviousness—this motley narrative is brought together in touching...

The third volume is devoted to the first period of Nicholas Pavlovich's reign. The nature of ‘Knight Nicholas,’ as he was called in childhood, the ‘Don Quixote of autocracy,’ as he was later called, was infused with the absolute conservatism of his mentors, the historian Nikolai Karamzin and General Matthias Lambsdorff: the individual is insignificant, the state is valuable in itself. An...

Reading these poems and looking at these photographs, it feels like you've seen it all somewhere else. A small town no one dreams of visiting, with a train station and a bus stop. A fellow traveler with a bag of London bags packed by his wife. An apartment rental ad: a TV always by the window, a sofa, two armchairs against the wall. Little things that never seem important, but only they can...

Andrey Dudko's novel is a psychedelic parody of autofiction. The protagonist, a fake alter ego of the writer, abandons his family and job and retreats to the provincial town of Slonim to create a literary masterpiece in the solitude of his empty family home. However, alcohol, casual sex, and the phantoms of his childhood haunting the city hinder his creativity. Instead of writing, the...

‘Diary’ is a chronicle of the psychological breakdown of the country. The time of overturned destinies and burned-out feelings gives birth to a special literature, uncomfortable and disturbing. Here the author becomes general. Therefore, without a name, about everyone in the first person. ‘It's very difficult to write - everything is a stupor. Our current context adds to the senselessness -...

Experiencing unrequited love, the heroine of Daria Traiden's novel buys a village house in Belarus and begins renovating it. Transforming and inhabiting her own space on her native land is her strategy for preserving meaning. Reflecting on body, identity, poverty, violence, and family, the author searches for and reinvents her roots. Equally about love and home, the book explores the...