Lada, or Joy: A Chronicle of Faithful and Happy Love

“The literary-artistic work offered to your attention is our author’s first prose experience. And although T. Yu. Kibirоv can’t be called a newcomer in the field of Russian literature (not long ago, by the way, the twentieth anniversary of his fruitful creative activity was noted—and that’s counting from his first publication, and from his first little poem it’s already forty-plus years!), and although this writer is by no means timid (of course, in a literary sense) and—like Kaverin’s captains and Tennyson’s Ulysses—has long had on his shield the motto ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!’*, still, despite all this, I’m terribly frightened and embarrassed, so I begin, after all, with the natural and familiar lyrical song:

* <u>“To dare, to seek, to find, and not to yield!”</u>
(Trans. from English by G. Kruzhkov).
That’s how, I suppose, Lady Lada’s grief-stricken lament would sound in a translation into human, Russian.”