Опубликовано в журнале Дружба Народов, номер 11, 2007
ANATILIJ AZOLSKIJ. Margara, or Shoot Me at the Dawn.
There is living an ordinary Soviet man, a research worker of a laboratory for standard tests. As known, “there was no sex” in the USSR, but the protagonist suddenly begins to feel sexual attraction — and not just to a woman, but to a woman with highly firm ideological principles, whom even to approach to is unthinkable. This is where tests, not at all standard, begin for the protagonist as well as for all the other characters of this non-ordinary story.
DMITRIJ SUCHKOV. Booth Petty Stories.
The beginning of the 1990-s. Life suddenly has tuned over, got out of whatever control at all and dashed no one knew where — without aim or direction. Time of ordeal, absurdity theater, struggle. Some people were struggling for surviving, other — for building themselves into the new circumstances, many — for both. By his not stories and not tales but exactly “petty stories” D. Suchkov makes his contribution into trying to understand that time.
ANATOLIJ TZIRULNIKOV. A Man Upside-Down from the Village of Karaulnaya. Unfinished Life Story of Siberian Schools.
Academician Anatolij Tzirulnikov is a pedagogue and a passionate traveler all over the most remote parts of Russia, where he certainly first of all visits different educational institutions from colleges to tiny village schools. But his interest is not limited by pedagogy as it is. Studying various school experiments, watching the life of teachers, pupils, their parents, their milieu he tries to understand how people survive — and sometimes quite successfully — in today’s arduous situation with no help from the State and makes their experience known to others.
VALENTIN KURBATOV. Life-time.
The usual intonation of talks about literature nowadays is either destructive or skeptical: no, these modern writers are not Tolstoys or Dostoevskijs. To make a lot of money is the only thing they are longing that’s why they are manufacturing kitsch. But once you came into the stream — nearly a panegyric may arise: “But with years passing I often caught myself at being grateful and impatiently waiting for new books — what’s in them? Little by little even some tendencies began to show through — one might as well make a classification like Linnaeus’.