The Third Stage

Lyuba Makarevskaya’s stories could be classified as the prose of a poet—she is indeed a poet and handles the Russian language as an experienced trainer handles a tiger. Or you could classify them by the degree of sincerity, openness, and the drive to clearly see things that it’s practically impossible to look at directly—painful, shameful, frightening—things to perceive as the most serious conversation about the most important matters. Lyuba Makarevskaya writes about pain, death, love, and memory as if she’s lending the reader her gaze, her body, and some tiny, flickering fragment of a soul. Reading her, you are always inside something that is simultaneously “me” and “not me.” Her amazing gift is to describe emotional dissociation without any textual dissociation—remaining both inside and, at the same time, outside—like a magical snowball effect. Lyuba writes with sharp snowflakes and her own blood on this glass, sending her messages to us and to the world; reading them is a little painful, but that pain heals.

Tatyana Zamirovskaya, author of the novel “Deaths. net”.

The opening quote from Sabina Spielrein in this book is, of course, no accident. There is a particular line of women’s writing: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elisabeth Wurtzel. Lyuba Makarevskaya consciously follows in their footsteps. First and foremost, this is a book about self-destruction and the drive toward Thanatos.

Olga Breininger, writer.

“If you imagine that all shadows meet at a single point, will that point be only the impossibility of any truth? And don’t I, in the end, want the fire to erase my greed along with the insatiability of my sight? And again, lying on the bed, I close my eyes and enclose the world in darkness, keeping within me the looks, skin, and facial expressions of others—of all those with whom I was connected in the last months—and at last I disappear. My sight becomes more than I am myself; it crosses me out, like a sea wave on the eve of either nuclear war or the Russian winter—something that, for the mind, is almost always the same.”