Опубликовано в журнале Дружба Народов, номер 3, 2010
ALEXEJ USTIMENKO. Chinese Masks of Cherubina de Gabriak.
Cherubina de Gabriak… Silver Age with its lovely mystifications… The long short story by prosaist from Tashkent A.Ustimenko is about what has become after. Later on. In quite another age. And very very far from St-Petersburg… incidentally renamed into Leningrad.
RADA POLISCHUK. Lapserdak out of Rags. Three pieces from a new book.
Lapserdak is a long-flap overcoat of Polish and Galician Jews, a frock-coat of some special cut. And what is a rag everybody of course knows. “Lapserdak out of rags” surely is a metaphor not void of smart paradox. As well as the Big History. Well, all our life somehow is a paradox. And the multitude of short stories this very Big History is made of also is a paradox. Sad, funny, human…
SONA VAN. Earth Like Air.
Brilliant poetry of Sona Van, an Armenian poet living in the USA, is interesting and appealing not only for those knowing the Armenian language. In Russian translations made by another, Russian poet MARINA KUDIMOVA, her lyrics would be a revelation for our readers.
VASSILIJ GOLOVANOV. The Age of Rock-n-Roll.
“Rock-n-Roll was a molten magma of barbarity poured down from beneath the rank civilizations. As any barbarity it was fraught with danger and its purposes were barbariously imposing: to take by assault the old culture and to substitute it with a fantastic and appalling carnival in which ▒the last would become the first’ (by the word of Dilan) and all the tribes and peoples of the Earth would unite in one bacchanalia dance…”
ZAKHAR PRILEPIN. “I Love the World where Iliad and Odyssey…”
Zakhar Prilepin who was fighting in Chechnya in special forces, “natzbol” and one of the “brands” of the Russian literature of the 2000-s in his talk with Natalya Igrunova is meditating over the Soviet historical experience and literary heritage, over politics, faith and the all-national idea, over his work on the Biography of Leonid Leonov and the idea of his own new novel.