Опубликовано в журнале Дружба Народов, номер 6, 2012
DENIS GUTZKO. The Son of Valyek
“Generally he didn’t like terribly to address to the strangers in the street. But with Vanya it happened spontaneously and unexpectedly easily”. However the continuation of the story turned out not at all easy, but deeply moving, quite unpredictable and very dramatic. This new long short story by the well-known Russian prosaist and regular author of “DN”, the winner of the Russian Booker prize-2005 Denis Gutzko is really one of his best.
ALLA BOSSART. Cholera
It’s easy to suppose that a piece of writing with such a title and forewarned by a citation from “La Peste” (“The Plague”) by Albert Camus will narrate about the dangerous disease. Not at all. In fact it’s a freak of imagination, satire, grotesque, thriller mixed with vaudeville – a kind of modern carnival disguising anxiety and mental anguish.
ELENA DOLGOPYAT. The Illusion-Cinema. A short story
Short and long short stories by E. Dolgopyat are well known to the readers – she is a master of the intricate plot, paradox, unexpected change turns. In this aspect “The Illusion-Cinema” stylistically may seem not very usual for her, but still…
POETRY
The older poets – VADIM RABINOVITCH, ILYA FALIKOV, YAN BRUSHTEIN and LIDIYA GRIGORYEVA usually working in the trend of traditional versification — are searching here for the new possibilities in the rhythm, semantic shifts, puns and diversity of intonations. The verses by the well-known Azerbaijan poet MAMED ISMAIL now living in Turkey are full of lyricism and nostalgia, bitter “lessons of living apart” call for coming back – including the return to the home-reader.
LEONID MEDVEDKO. The Burning East and Russian Mediterra
Isn’t the era of the early Middle Ages and crusades coming back to the broadened Near East? How to detect the more and more erasing distinction between the terror and anti-terror, “humanitarian interventions” and humanitarian catastrophes provoked by them? How to draw the line between the Good and the Evil, ▒the culture of the peace” and “anti-culture of the war”? The well-known orientalist L. Medvedko is analyzing the modern situation in the Arab countries.