A New Chapter. Part 2
Russian Writing from the 21st Century
ROSSICA 22 is the second issue in ‘A New Chapter’, a special double release marking the Russian Market Focus at the London Book Fair, bringing the best in contemporary Russian literature to an English-speaking audience. ROSSICA 22 showcases the diversity and quality of Russian fiction: featured extracts range from the intellectual games of Evgeny Vodolazkin’s quasi-academic ‘research novel’ Solovyov and Larionov to the hard-boiled police procedural of Alexandra Marinina’s taut crime thriller The City Rate; from the nineteenth- century realia of Pavel Basinsky’s Escape from Paradise, his best-selling life of Tolstoy, to Anna Starobinets’ vivid vision of the future, The Living One. As if this were not enough, this issue also boasts new translations of the latest works by two of the established stars of the Russian literary scene – Mikhail Shishkin and Dina Rubina.
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin on 12 April 1961. It is, therefore, very fitting that this issue of ROSSICA includes an exclusive preview of Lev Danilkin’s forthcoming biography of Gagarin which describes the cosmonaut’s historic visit to Britain later in the same year.
We would like to thank the huge number of people involved in the production of these two volumes: literary agents, publishers, translators, designers and many more. ROSSICA is reliant on their co-operation, and their dedication to sharing Russia’s literary treasures with the world.
Svetlana A. Adjoubei
Director, Academia Rossica
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Contents
8 Letter Book
21 Lev Tolstoy: Flight from Paradise
29 Solovyov and Larionov
A Novel of Research
39 The White Dove of Córdoba
51 The City Rate
Alexandra Marinina
61 Pet Monkey of the House of Tang
Master Chen (Dmitry Kosyrev)
71 Gagarin – Man and Myth
101 The Living One
121 The writers
