Опубликовано в журнале Дружба Народов, номер 5, 2011
IRINA GOLUB. A Girl and the War.
This is a long short memoir story written by the daughter of the Ukrainian author Boris Antonenko-Davidovich who had been subjected to repression. The story is about the life or rather survival of a ten-year old girl on the occupied territory (1941 — 1943). But out of her far from childish ordeals this girl has carried out the deeply endured conviction of ineradicable fortitude of human kindness.
RUBEN OVSEPYAN. Under the Apricot Trees.
This novel, full of today’s realities and historical references, has some “fourth dimension”. There are presented in it not only beautiful Armenian women capable to emerge even out of the “burst frogs” and not only a strange picture on the wall, in which the protagonist can really lie stretching himself under the apricot-trees and taking a rest from craziness of the modern world smelling of kerosene, gunpowder and hack politics, but something more too.
ALEXANDER MEZIROV. Last Poems.
Alexander Mezirov is one of the most important Russian poets of the second half of the XX century. Many people know his piercing poems about the Great Patriotic War and his lyrics. The poems presented here tell about what he was thinking and writing about in the USA where the last years of his tragic life were passing.
NICKOLAY SHMELEV. Prognoses and Hopes.
“One can’t say with certainty that within the life of two or three future generations Russia will manage to overcome the consequences of brutal structural changes in the economy which the country has happen to endure in the last twenty years”. The well-known economist N. Shmelev is meditating on today’s situation in Russia.
OLGA LEBEDUSHKINA. Repentance and Absolution.
More and more often we resemble a character of some fantasy hit whose unnecessary memory has been substituted for the necessary one. Eye-witnesses are passing away and even the Great Patriotic War is already turning into a myth. These notes are about today’s literature as the work of memory and oblivion.