Конец XVIII века. После кончины Екатерины Великой императорская корона переходит к Павлу I, давно решившему, как надо управлять государством. Он убежден, что русские аристократы испорчены, но их можно исправить, если привить им обычаи древнего рыцарства. Истинный рыцарь живет скромно и просто, честен и справедлив, защищает слабых и обиженных – именно так поступает Павел, подавая всем пример. Однако светские интриганы, окружающие его, далеки от р ...
«В Москве, в церкви Всемилостивого Спаса, что в Наливках, в 1727 году, было два священника и дьякон. Один из священников, отец Гавриил (Григорьев), был „действительный поп“, т. е. настоящий священник здешнего прихода, а другой – отец Кирилл (Федоров) „не действительный“, а „приукаженный поп, по эпитрахильному указу“, то есть это был безместный и приставленный к церкви Всемилостивого Спаса в помощь „действительному“ священнику, отцу Гавриилу…» ...
The End. And Again is a novel about war, romance and rock n roll. It takes us back to Ljubljana and the Balkans in late 1980s and early 1990s through the reminiscences of an embittered bureaucrat Peter, a corrupt manager Goran and eternal runaway Mary. After taking a fateful bus ride, Mary once fell in love with Denis, a passionate rock musician, but their love story was tragically cut short when she, a young missionary, was ordered to leave the ...
The heroine of Dogs and Others is ahiled as the first openly lesbian character in modern Serbian literature, but she is so much more than that, as she encapsulates the Zeitgeist of her generation. Coming of age in 1970s Belgrade, then the capital city of thriving, socialist Yugoslavia, we follow Lida and the bohemian life she leads, made more complicated by the trials and tribulations of her eccentric family. The whole novel breathes with a raw ...
Doppelganger consists of two stories that skillfully revisit the question of doubles (famously explored by Stevenson, Dostoyevsky and others), and how an individual is perpetually caught between their own beliefs and those imposed on them by society. Arthur and Isabella is a story of the relationship between two elderly people who meet on New Years Eve a romantic encounter which turns into a grotesque portrayal of the loneliness of old age. The ...
It's Carnival time 2012, and the Slovenian city of Maribor is European Capital of Culture. In an attempt to maximize profit, local politicians and showman peddle every possible art form. Amidst the hype, dramatist Adam Bely and CubanAustrian journalist Rosa Portero pursue a secret mission: to track down and overthrow the sinister octopus of 13 selected persons that seems to be in control. On the way, they encounter a variety of important ci ...
A world without truth would be immensely sad, states the magistrate in the murder trial of local boy, Janek. A young man with serious mental issues, Janek's strange 'chestnut crown' woven from the leaves of a supposedly sacred tree was found on the body of the farmer Geder; stabbed to death with a bread knife. Through a series of flashbacks during the interrogations, we learn of Janek's story: from the perversion of his relat ...
Pavel Vilikovsky's novella Fleeting Snow (Letmy sneh, 2014), describes the gradual loss of memory of the narrator's wife. The narrator reminisces about his past life with his wife and muses on issues ranging from human nature and the soul, to names and the phonetics of Slovak and indigenous American Indian languages, in an informal, humorous style whose lightness of touch belies the seriousness of his themes. The book's title refe ...
