Nine short stories with madness in the background
Maya Kucherskaya, Maria Galina, Sukhbat Aflatuni, Ksenia Buksha, Anna Starobinets, Nataliya Meshchaninova, Sergei Nosov, Sergei Kuznetsov, Marina Stepnova step out of the shadow of the great names of the Russian literary classics and go off the beaten track of traditional works with their uncompromising work.
These are not only the crimes, intrigues, mysticism and nihilism so well known to us from the works of the masters but above all a multitude of emotions, a play on the genre and an entry into the world of a more contemporary reader. These short stories are Russian literary allegories about the here and now.
"Besides the noble, heavy and old-fashioned Russian literature, a literature of a completely different genre grows hiding in the shadows – younger, more cheerful and in a positive way universal, human. This is exactly the literature that I would like to present to Polish readers – feminine rather than masculine, entertaining rather than serious, up-to-date rather than traditional." – says Galina Yuzefovich, one of Russia's most famous and respected literary critics, who prepared the selection of short stories.
Nine short stories with madness in the background is the result of an innovative project of the Centre for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding "Word to Word. Polish-Russian Translation School", which aims to train a new generation of translators and promote contemporary Russian writers. The stories in the collection were translated by: Natalia Dziurdzińska, Jan German, Izabela Jasińska, Marta Łukaszewicz, Sebastian Markiewicz, Paulina Pielech, Katarzyna Roman-Rawska, Jacek Skoczek and Paula Walczak.
