Sergei Solovyov is a poet, artist, and traveler, author of more than 20 books of prose, poetry and essays in Russian, including Feast, Book, Her Names, Man and Other, novels Amort and Adam’s Bridge. He was a laureate of the Russian Prize and Planet of the Poet Prize, and he was a finalist for a number of prizes, including the Bely Prize. Born in Kiev in 1959, he graduated from the Philological Faculty of Chernovtsi University and worked as a restoration artist of monumental painting in churches and monasteries of Ukraine. In the mid-eighties he created Noldistanciya, an avant-garde theater in Kiev; in the nineties he launched Kovcheg, a journal of art and literature. In 2000, he created an architectural project for a metagame labyrinth city (Germany). In the mid-2000s, he created Speech Landscapes, a club of free thinking, and he also became editor-in-chief of Figures of Speech, the almanac of contemporary literature, based in Moscow. In recent, pre-COVID19 years, he traveled in the hinterland of India, making films and writing books. He lives in Munich.
A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.
This collection of personal essays by a bi-national Russian/U.S. author offers glimpses into many things Soviet and post-Soviet: the sacred, the profane, the mundane, the little-discussed and the often-overlooked. What was a Soviet school dance like? Did communists go to church? Did communists listen to Donna Summer? If you want to find out, read on!
“Cold War Casual” is a collection of transcribed oral testimony and interviews translated from Russian into English and from English into Russian that delve into the effect of the events and the government propaganda of the Cold War era on regular citizens of countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Julia Wiener was born in the USSR a few years before the Second World War; her youth was spent during the “Thaw” period, and her maturity coincided with the years of “Soviet stagnation”, which, in her case, ended with her emigration to Israel in the early 1970s. Her wartime childhood, her Komsomol-student youth, her subsequent disillusionment, her meetings with well-known writers (Andrei Platonov, Victor Nekrasov, etc.) are described in a humorous style and colorful detail. Julia brings to life colorful characters – from her Moscow communal apartment neighbors to a hippie London lord, or an Arab family, headed by a devotee of classical Russian literature. No less diverse are the landscapes against which the events unfold: the steppes of Kazakhstan, the Garden of Gethsemane, New York, Amsterdam, London.
Julia Wiener’s novels focus on those moments when illusory human existence collapses in the face of true life, be it spiritual purity, love, old age, or death.