“An Un known Self-Portrait” is Denis Dragunsky’s new high-stakes novel about the connection between historical epochs.
Once, in a huge apartment in a Stalin-era building lived an academician, then an artist, then a minister, and then his son—a scientist, the head of a secret laboratory. Now this apartment has been bought by a major financier. His young wife, a woman with ambitions, decides to write a novel about all these people. In the intertwining of fates and events, mysterious stories unfold about creativity and espionage, betrayal and illegitimate children, disappearances and returns—and about the power of artistic fiction, which sometimes defeats reality itself.