Armastan. I Love You Too

Anna Matveyeva is the author of the novels “Every Hundred Years,” “Dyatlov Pass, or the Mystery of Nine,” “The Enviable Sense of Vera Stenina,” and “There Is!”; short story collections “Katya Is Going to Sochi,” “Hidden Rivers,” “Lolotta and Other Parisian Stories,” as well as books “Citizens” and “Picture Girls.” A finalist of the “Big Book” and “Yasnaya Polyana” awards. In her new collection of stories and novellas “Armastan,” all texts are somehow connected to visuals—paintings, photographs, posters, drawings—in other words, everything that Gertrude Stein called “pictures on a flat surface.” Artists, museums, creative suffering—and also painful searches for housing, love delusions, and nostalgia. Everything we love. That’s why “armastan” in Estonian means “I love.”.