Someone Else's Letters

3 hrs. 38 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Alexander Morozov

Narrator Vasily Michkov

Description

Morozov A. wrote the first novel “Foreign Letters” in 1968 and showed the manuscript to his university teacher, the literary scholar Vladimir Turbin, who advised Morozov to apply to the magazine “Novy Mir” (“New World”) and even wrote a recommendation letter to Deputy Editor-in-Chief Vladimir Lakshin. But the magazine rejected the novel, and it wasn’t published until 1997.

If, by some chance, by someone’s oversight or a misunderstanding, Alexander Morozov’s novella had appeared in print exactly at the time it was written, it would undoubtedly have received a thickly smeared, absolutely slanderous verdict: “defamatory potboilers,” “ideological sabotage,” “a relapse of reactionary Dostoevsky-ism.” The author could easily have been brought under Article 190-pr — “slander against the Soviet system.” Now, however, after all that has happened to us, many readers may perceive the novella rather as a kind of nostalgia for that better thing which, despite the outward circumstances that harmed people, had existed in people’s souls.

In 1998, “Foreign Letters” was awarded the Booker Prize.