“This intimately funny and desperately sad novel opens with a parade of visitors to Ilya Ilich Oblomov’s Petersburg flat. Most of them are introduced, in this new translation, by the phrase “in walked”, which creates a wonderful sense of flatness, repetition and invasion. All but one of the visitors are busy in some way or other, full of talk of the world, parties, work, the latest literary news. . . The very descriptions of these people make us tired, setting us up for a largely (although not entirely) disreputable identification with the book’s slothful hero. . . Oblomov is not exactly a person, and this is only partly a psychological novel. . . the story of his non-life and real death, his long kindness to himself, is really the story of a series of stances and occasions, human possibilities squandered and slept through. . . The writing here. . . offers a fine example of sly and compassionate satire, a very rare genre indeed.” — Michael Wood, London Review of Books, August 5, 2009
Recently Published
2017, by Olga Slavnikova (Overlook Press)-
Works in Progress
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Yuzefovich, “Cranes and Pygmies”
Yuzefovich’s latest novel, Cranes and Pygmies, has won Russia’s Big Book award and been nominated for the National Bestseller prize. To read my sample translation, click here. For a full proposal, contact the Elena Kostioukovitch agency (rights@elkost.com).
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Olga Slavnikova’s Train Stories
A series of twelve stories written for the Russian Railroads glossy in-train magazine, now published in Russian as Love in Train Car No. 7. Already published: "Love in Train Car No. 7" (Chtenia/Readings 05 Winter 2009), “Substance” (Subtropics, no. 7, Winter-Spring 2009). Circulating: "Recluse," "Russian Bullet." Circulating: "The Cherepanova Sisters," the Russian original of which won the 2009 Yuri Kabakov Prize for Best Short Story.
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Leonid Yuzefovich, Harlequin’s Costume
Harlequin’s Costume, the first volume in Leonid Yuzefovich’s popular historical detective trilogy set in St. Petersburg and based on the real life Chief Inspector Putilin. The successful Russian TV mini-series, “Detective Ivan Dmitrievich Putilin,” was based on this trilogy. The manuscript is complete. Not yet under contract.
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Yuzefovich, “Cranes and Pygmies”
Liubov Popova's maquette of a set for Meyerhold’s 1922 production of The Magnificent CuckoldInterviews
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The graphics used on this site were inspired by the work of Liubov Popova (1889-1924), a Russian artist and designer influenced by Constructivism and Futurism, as seen in her biography, by D.V. Sarabianov and N.L. Adaskina, Liubov Popova, translated by Marian Schwartz and published by Harry N. Abrams in 1990.