‘Vilnius Poker’ by Ricardas Gavelis (1950-2002) is a striking example of Lithuanian postmodernism. The novel was published in 1989 and has since been reprinted and translated into other languages many times. It became the basis for a performance and an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Vilnius. This is the first time the book has been published in Russian. The translation has been...

The endless Russian flight brings the first wave of emigrants to the Balkans. They have only a couple of decades of peaceful life between two catastrophes — from the Civil War to the Second World War. Each turn of the novel puts the heroes — musicians, writers, journalists — before a classic collision of the 20th century: how to remain human in the millstones of history. And each of them...

‘Letters from Nowhere’ is both a book by Jonas Mekas and a book about Jonas Mekas. The very first definition that any reference book gives about him is ‘the godfather of the New York film avant-garde’. The fact that this Lithuanian-American poet, writer, director, critic and producer is much broader and deeper than any idea about him is evidenced by his ‘Letters from Nowhere’ - a series of...

The hero of the novel by one of the most popular writers of modern Lithuania, Herkus Kuncius (born in 1965), is a Lithuanian intellectual of the bohemian persuasion languishing in Paris, whose observations, thoughts and comments about the French capital and its inhabitants form the content of the book. The author’s description of Paris at first evokes amazement, which turns into a smile, and...

The collection ‘White Shroud’ introduces the Russian reader to the prose of Antanas Škema (1911-1961) - one of the most interesting and significant writers of the Lithuanian emigrant wave of the 1940s

The book, written by the famous historian Yuri Felshtinsky, is a detective story about the multifaceted interweaving of the destinies of Russian businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev, who went from being suspected of involvement in a murder to becoming a billionaire, in whose pockets were such different people as the president of the island of Cyprus, the prince of Monaco, the dictator of Belarus...

This book is the third in a documentary series about the fates of Soviet writers. The first, ‘The Knot. Poets of Friendship and Breaks,’ is dedicated to the 1920s and 1930s. The second, ‘Noah’s Ark of Writers,’ is about the evacuation of Soviet writers and their families during the war to Tashkent, Alma-Ata, Chistopol, and Yelabuga. Together, these books create a kind of fresco of Soviet...

This book is a chronicle of an unprecedented exposure of torture, tacitly legalized in Russian prisons. An ordinary guy from Belarus, Sergei Savelyev, was sent to a Russian prison on a fabricated drug case and first experienced the bloody hell of ‘re-education’. Later, when he was recruited to work as an administrator in a prison hospital, he gained access to a gigantic video archive stored...

‘The Hopak Equation’ by Ukrainian writer Lesha Palkich has the subtitle ‘about a war without war.’ In this parable novel, a southerner, a family man, good-natured, is forced to go to war with the northerners in order to earn money to save his son. But what kind of war is this? ‘The inhabitants of the North and South were one people in ancient times...’ The massacre started by the government...

‘Memorial is a community of public organizations working on human rights and the history of victims of Soviet repression. At the moment when the Nobel Committee awarded Memorial the Peace Prize, Boris Belenkin was in Moscow in the courthouse and was a defendant in a lawsuit filed by the prosecutor's office, which had seized the society's premises. This book is not the history of Memorial,...

Bobo is a white elephant that the Turkish sultan gives to the Russian tsar. Bobo dreams of being a war elephant and serving his new sovereign. The elephant walks through modern Russia, with its war and resistance, wealth and poverty, well-fed grunts and anticipation of a nuclear strike. Bobo talks to warblers and designers, poets and embezzlers, clergy and pigs. Bobo makes history, but only...

The first half of the nineties was a time of great hopes and expectations associated with the collapse of the communist regime and the acquisition of independence. And today, recalling the events of more than thirty years ago, I ask myself: “What went wrong? Why were these expectations not met?” I hope that the book will encourage the reader to reflect on this topic.