Brynhild, or The Show of Things

Roland Dvorzhits’s reputation as a writer is thrown into jeopardy: photographs leak to the press showing him in an absurd light. The scandal pushes him toward an unexpected idea—what if his own public image could be not endured, but designed? Swept up in his scheme, Dvorzhits turns to the advertising man Immanuel Klyat—he must build him a flawless “facade.”

But the more convincing the new shell becomes, the harder it is for Brünnhilde, Dvorzhits’s wife, to see the living person she once loved behind it. And one day she clearly understands: their marriage is nothing more than a stage set. This realization becomes the first step on the journey she must take to break free from the power of the “facade” and find herself.

A late novel by the classic science-fiction writer Herbert Wells, in many ways ahead of its time, reveals him in an unexpected role—as a satirist and a social thinker—and continues the series “Yandex Books Translations,” a joint project with “Podpisnye izdaniya” and the “Brusnika Workshop.”