The Moonstone

Milorad Pavić is a famous Serbian miracle-worker of words who overturned ideas about what artistic prose can be. His “Dictionary of the Khazars” proved not only to be the most important book of magical realism, standing on the same level as Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” but also the work that was ahead of its time. Yet few people know that Milorad Pavić was not only a novelist: he translated poetry, giving Serbs a new translation of “Eugene Onegin,” and he began his literary path as a poet. For the first time in Russian, we present a collection of selected poems by this great writer: as quirky, mysterious, and metaphorical as Pavić’s prose. Woven together from centuries of Serbian history and details of modern life, these poems are the starting points of all of Pavić’s creative work—crystals in whose facets the enigmatic plots of the Serbian master are reflected.