A House in Meshchera

11 hrs. 20 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Alexander Ilichevsky

Narrator Vyacheslav Gerasimov

Description

The young man who was lingering in thought— the hero of A. Ilichevsky’s novel “The House in Meshchera”—was so sensitive to his own perceptions and failed to figure out what was going on around him that, before he could even blink, his companion, more receptive to the state of things, launched a brilliant career and realized what it means to have power over those whom she surpassed in how well they adapt to the coming circumstances.

The heroine of the novella, more of a “quiet one” in character than an Amazon, is a psychologist who works in a hospice where incurable patients are kept. The mission of the institution founded in Russia by an American, Cortez, is to prepare terminal patients for their fatal fate in an atmosphere of mental equilibrium and to ease the suffering of the “transition period.” This house of the doomed is a complex ethical and architectural project—a system of medical and psychological means that Cortez developed and implemented across the world.