The Gray House (full version)

33 hrs. 37 min.

Language Russian

Author Mariam Petrosyan

Narrator Igor Knyazev

Description

On the edge of the city, among standard new-builds, stands the Grey House, where Sphinx, the Blind One, the Lord, Tabaki, Macedonian, the Black, and many others live. It’s unknown whether the Lord really comes from a noble line of dragons, but the Blind One is indeed blind, and the Sphinx is wise. Tabaki isn’t, of course, a jackal—though he does love to feast on other people’s property. Everyone in the House has their own nickname, and one day there can hold as much as, for us in the Outside, you can’t live through in an entire lifetime. Each House accepts someone or rejects them. The House keeps an immense number of secrets, and the commonplace “skeletons in the closet” are only the most understandable corner of that invisible world where you can’t get in from the Outside, where the usual laws of space and time stop working.

The House is something much more than an orphanage for children who were abandoned by their parents. The House is their separate universe.

From the performer, Igor Knyazev: So much has been written about this book. “House…” has been officially recognized (the “Big Book” award) and by a huge audience of readers. The book is strange, with an unusual fate—maybe that fate contains the key. Mariam spent many years in it, as if in a refuge, a secret shelter from the hardships of military life. The artist’s attentiveness and sharp mind make this hidden House very convincing, full of color and detail. That’s how you read this book—simply by entering it and looking around. Reading it a second time, you notice what you missed, you understand the familiar better, you savor, you empathize. You listen to music. In short, you live. You live by words. What else is needed? The book isn’t invented—it came to the author, and that is always a miracle. Thank you, Mariam.

Specially for Logos VOS we made a new version of “House,” 3.5 hours longer. This is the most complete version of the text of all versions available online.

From the proofreader, Svetlana Bondarenko: Not long ago I came across a review by Dm. Bykov. Here are 2 quotes from it. In my view, you could have stopped at the first one. The rest is “from the devil”: it’s not about that. Still, it was interesting to read.

“ ‘House, in which…’ is a wonderful work, and, very possibly, the door to that new literature everyone had been waiting for. Hence the feeling of terrifying unfamiliarity that so many people talked about—along with a sharp rejection, and sheer delight, the excess of which in some reviews offends taste no less than the mentioned rejection…<…>”

“Most of all, this book can be harmed by slobbery praises, because it isn’t, of course, about sick children, and certainly not about abandoned children: it hits straight into the very main nerve of modern literature…”

“Terrible nightmare seen by a bookish girl who read a lot of fantasy and got acquainted with Gallego’s book—that’s the genre of Petrosyan’s novel.”

No, Dmitry Lvovich! Even though you’re a master, let me disagree.

The “bookish girl,” who has been reading for more than half a century (though only a little fantasy—not my genre!) and who read Gallego’s book almost 10 years ago, dares to object: it’s not a nightmare.

A fairy tale? Yes. A parable? Yes. Fantasy? Yes. A drama? Yes. A realistic novel? Yes, yes, yes.

And overall—a very serious yet at the same time ironic book, with living everyday humor,

written in simple, understandable language—understandable to any age: from 12… to infinity.

And what about the genre?… Do we really need to label it?

Thanks to Ayvariz for the tech help with the cover.