“Truth and not-truth, like the rings of a python, have tangled together in the time and the people I happened to meet, to know. The rings cut him into pieces; the python died, and the vultures are eating it. But it turned out that coexisting with vultures is even more disgusting…”
Memoir notes by Nadezhda Kozhevnikova, daughter of the well-known Soviet prose writer Vadim Kozhevnikov, are crowded with many people who today would be called an elite: Oleg Efremov, Yevgeny Mravinский, Andrey Mironov, Aleksandr Chakovsky, Heinrich Neuhaus… However, the book also includes dozens of “ordinary” people whom the author met in Lavrushinsky Lane, in Switzerland, or in America.
Nadezhda Kozhevnikova’s sharpness is not only in her gaze, but also in her language. Once, the prototype of the main hero in her story “Elena the Beautiful” complained to the Central Committee. Those who want to complain somewhere will probably find themselves even after this book…
Contents:
From the author
An inheritance that was never granted
A kid in a cage
The master of Hyde Park
Sideboard
Collectors
The Canopy Dancer, or the new tale about Buratino
A glass throat
Kimmeria
Not our food—lemons
Tragedy of returning
A piano from the Pasterнак home
A landscape with us and without us
Dogs of Soviet classics
School of envy
The confession of Gulliver captured by the Lilliputians
A white mare
A sheep in a wolf’s skin
Tusya and Dania
And who wouldn’t want to start their own business?
Medicine for nostalgia
A dangerous zone, or recipes from Korotich
The world is a theater, but not all people are actors
The lucky ones
When idols grow old, or plaster over marble
A gray skirt, a small black sweater
A guarantee of presence
Foxtrot
Love
Scent of the homeland
Father and son
Cinderella
Vanya an American
Bride
A floor in an empire
A view from the windows
A corridor
Wind of wandering
The little red flower
God’s creature, trembling beast, vile flesh
Major renovation
Koly a nightingale
Queen Verochka
Club jacket
Lost dreams
Separation without sadness?
Exile from paradise
A border