Justified Jealousy

Three decades collected under one cover. The collection presents the best novellas personally selected by the author.

Andrey Bitov’s prose from the 60s–80s became classics of 20th-century Russian literature, but now it feels like the natural answer to today’s day. The collection of novellas “Reasonable Jealousy” is an analogue of a life-time edition that Andrey Georgievich Bitov (1937–2018) compiled with special care. The book is complemented by his autobiographical “Postscript,” written at the end of his life.

“I’m not a person from the pack. I generally think that a human isn’t quite a pack animal. When he comes out of it, then he becomes a marginal. An artist or a criminal. I was lucky to choose the first—but it could have turned out to be the second. And since I’m still alive, I can’t just pass life by. No, no! It will touch me” (Andrey Bitov).