Yume Pictures and Academia Rossica are delighted to invite you to a special screening of the film 'A Room and a Half' at 8pm on 10 May at Cine Lumière, South Kensington, London, SW7 2DT, followed by Q&A with director Andrey Khrzhanovsky and actress Alisa Freyndlikh. It is a beautifully mesmerising film based on the life of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky.

Izbavi Bog i nas ot etakikh sudei

A few weeks ago something strange happened. Someone sent me, through the post, ten million printed words – I’ll repeat that, in case you weren’t concentrating: ten million words – nearly half of them in a difficult foreign language. I was told to get reading them.

Denis Gutsko was born in Tbilisi in 1969. In 1989 he moved to Rostov-on-Don where he lives to this day. He studied at the Geology and Geography Faculty of Rostov University and served a stint in the Soviet army. His father fought in the Abkhazian-Georgian conflicts of the early 1990s. After demobilisation Gutsko had difficulties with official registration and for several years worked as a bodyguard for a commercial security firm, writing prose in his spare time. Gutsko made his literary debut in 2000 with the short story ‘Прирученный лев’ (‘The Domesticated Lion’) and has since been published frequently in literary journals and magazines. His novel ‘Без Рути-Следа’ (‘Without Track or Trace’) which explores the tribulations of a Russian born in Tbilisi, won the Boris Sokolov Prize in 2005 and, in controversial circumstances, the Russian Booker Prize in the same year - despite a vote of four to one in his favour, the Booker Prize committee’s chairman publicly refused to name Gutsko the winner.

Mario has published numerous poetry books and pamphlets, including: Shrapnel and Sheets, Bosco, Heavy Water, Half Life, Fearnought (poems for Southwell Workhouse), along with translations of Catullus, Sappho and Montale. Lepidoptera is a hybrid book of long poetry and short prose, while his illustrated collection The Stamina of Sheep (the unique result of an innovative public and educational arts project for Havering, the Thames and Essex) captured the Essex Book Award for Best Fiction Publication (2000-2002). Flowers of Sulphur was published in 2007. Mario is currently working on two further collections, Monte Cassino and i tulips.

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Terekhov was born in June 1966 in the provincial town of Tula in Central Russia. After serving in the army he graduated in journalism from the Moscow State University. He soon won acclaim as a writer with his stories about his army experiences and about the early perestroika chaos he was witnessing.

Irina Polyanskaya (1952-2004) was the most autobiographical of recent Russian writers, as well as one of the most accomplished. Repelled by the impersonality of history as studied in schools or described in books, she focussed instead on the human past of her family and on family life in general, her view of which was anything but sentimenal. Polyanskaya was born in 1953, and spent her early years in the ‘Zone' in the Urals, where her convict father was put to work as a scientist. She trained as an actress, studied music, and later attended the Literary Institue in Moscow. For many years, her literary output was largely confined to the genre of the short story, but her last years (before illness cut short her life) brought the publication of several longer works, including The Passing of the Shade (Prokhozhdenie teni, 1997) and The Reading Water (Chitayushchaya voda, 2001). The thread of music runs through the first; cinematic motifs dominate the second.

Dmitry Novikov, born in 1966, began writing prose in his early thirties, after studying medicine at university and then entering business. He lives in Petrozavodsk, Karelia. In 2007 he received the New Pushkin Prize for his third book of stories, Longing (Vozhdelenie, 2005, 320pp). ‘The Toads of Revenge and Conscience', which reflects the author's love of the North, and especially the White Sea, is taken from this collection.

In the three years since his first book was published, Oleg Zaionchkovsky (b. 1959) has gained the widespread admiration of critics and readers alike, a fact which appears to have taken the author himself by surprise. Until his recent move to Moscow, Zaionchkovsky had spent his entire adult life in the small town of Khotkovo, outside the capital, where he met his future wife at school at the age of thirteen, and where he worked as a metal worker and electrical engineer before trying his hand at prose at his wife's insistence. The result was Sergeev and the Little Town (Sergeev i gorodok, 2005), a book of short stories describing small-town byt (daily life). Marketed by its publishers, OGI, as a novel, it was immediately short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize. Petrovich came out that same year. Taking the reader through Petrovich's childhood and adolescence, it prompts comparison with other treatments of early life in the Russian literary tradition (by Lev Tolstoy, Sergei Aksakov and others).

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Terekhov was born in June 1966 in the provincial town of Tula in Central Russia. After serving in the army he graduated in journalism from the Moscow State University. He soon won acclaim as a writer with his stories about his army experiences and about the early perestroika chaos he was witnessing.

27 and 29 January, 7.30pm
Barbican Hall
£5 for Academia Rossica fans!
Stravinsky's 'The Rite of Spring' and Bartok's 'Duke Bluebeard's Castle'
Stravinsky’s pulsating masterpiece was written for Nijinsky’s ballet about a prehistoric community which selects a young virgin for ecstatic human sacrifice. ‘We were dumbfounded,’ wrote an early listener, ‘overwhelmed by this hurricane which… had taken life by the roots.’

by Mikhail Ageyev
Translated by Hugh Aplin
Hesperus, 2008, pp.180
A bizarre and deeply disturbing account of a young man's descent into addiction, this story brilliantly mirrors the tumultuous events of early 20th-century Russian history. Struggling with the confusion and insecurities that adolescence brings, Vadim seeks an outlet for his frustration.

by Various
Translated by Peter Oram
Arc Publications, 2008, pp.132
An anthology of poems by the major literary figures in Russia, writing to, about, or in memory of other poets, following a tradition which started in the early years of the twentieth century and continued through the subsequent decades, more or less until the millennium.

Martin Dewhirst has lectured on Russian language and literature at the University of Glasgow since 1964. He is particularly interested in twentieth century Russian literature and has compiled many bibliographies on the subject for The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. He has worked periodically on the Samizdat staff of Radio Liberty in Munich and is also a specialist on Soviet censorship and archives.

Writer and filmmaker
He is the director of the forthcoming feature film, Folie à Deux, and Lanterna Magicka, a documentary about the Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas and early cinema.

Tretyakov Gallery
This issue is dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the Tretyakov Gallery, Russia’s most famous art museum which contains the national collection of Russian art.

Revelations in Colour
Dionisy & KandinskyThis issue of ROSSICA is dedicated to two great Russian artists, Dionisy and Vasily Kandinsky who were divided by four centuries.

Revelations in Colour
Dionisy & KandinskyThis issue of ROSSICA is dedicated to two great Russian artists, Dionisy and Vasily Kandinsky who were divided by four centuries.

Tretyakov Gallery
This issue is dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the Tretyakov Gallery, Russia’s most famous art museum which contains the national collection of Russian art.