The Third Stage

Lyuba Makarievskaya’s stories can be classified as prose of a poet—she is indeed a poet and handles the Russian language the way an experienced trainer handles a tiger. Or, by the degree of sincerity, openness, and the desire to see clearly things that it’s practically impossible to look at straight on—painful, shameful, terrifying—meaning to perceive them as an absolutely serious conversation about what matters most. Lyuba Makarievskaya writes about pain, death, love, and memory as if she’s lending the reader her own gaze, her body, and some tiny, shimmering fragment of her soul; when you read her, you’re always inside something that is at once “me” and “not me.” Her amazing gift is to describe emotional dissociation without textual dissociation—staying inside and at the same time outside. It’s like a magical snow globe effect. Lyuba writes on this glass with sharp snowflakes and her own blood 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 at the beginning of the book is, of course, no accident here. There is a special line of women’s writing: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elisabeth Wurtzel. Lyuba Makarievskaya consciously follows in their footsteps. First of all, this is a book about self-destruction and a drive toward Thanatos.

Olga Breininger, writer. "If you imagine that all shadows converge at one point, will that point be only the impossibility of any truth? And don’t I, in the end, want fire to erase my greed together with the insatiability of my sight? And now, lying on the bed, with my eyes closed, I enclose the world in darkness and keep within me the looks, skin, and facial expressions of the others—of all those I’ve been connected with over the last few months—and I finally disappear. My vision becomes more than me itself; it crosses me out, like a sea wave on the threshold of either a nuclear war or a Russian winter—which, for the mind, is almost always the same."