The Source of the Sun: The Summer of Our Lives

9 hrs. 21 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Yulia Kachalkina

Narrator Leontina Brotskaya

Description

We are all someone’s children, and sometimes mothers and fathers as well. A family is a kind of cosmos where black holes and mischievous comets appear, where solar eclipses happen, and where new stars are even born. Yevgraf Solomonovich Dektor—the hero of the novel “The Source of the Sun”—once a well-known Soviet playwright, now grows old, “poisoned” since childhood by the atmosphere of the Central House of Writers and by writers’ gatherings in his parents’ kitchen. He is completely unable to understand his sons. He thinks that Artem and Valya have “gotten into bad ways,” and when a little niece of Yevgraf’s is brought to their home on Krasnoarmeyskaya Street—Sashka—the situation becomes outright hopeless. Can each of them find their own source of love for their loved ones, their own “source of the sun”?

The novella included in the collection is a reading—reminiscence—of a couple of lines from Ray Bradbury’s famous novel “Dandelion Wine,” and it likewise fixes the stated “family theme.”