Valery Sosnovsky was born in 1967 and lives in Yekaterinburg. He graduated from the philosophy department of Ural State University. He worked as a political technologist, night watchman, journalist, and psychologist. His poems were published in many Russian magazines, such as Zvezda, Ural, Slovo/World, Neva, Novyi Zhurnal, etc. He is the author of In the Silence of the Midnight Prospect, a collection of poems. He organized “Days of Boris Ryzhy in Yekaterinburg” (2006-2016), an International Poetry Festival. Valery was a winner of Soul in the Cherished Lyre, organized by the American Pushkin Society as part of the competition 45th parallel (2019). His poems were translated into French and English. Valery is also a co-author of two documentary books on the history of plants in the Ural Mountains.
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.