A Solitary Writing Person

Dina Rubina, “A Lonely Writing Person,” is a shocking confession of a person whose life’s work is “writing different stories.” This book has no equal in contemporary Russian literature. Even abroad, in this genre, books usually offer manuals for making literary texts or autobiographies of famous bestseller authors. Dina Rubina’s “A Lonely Writing Person” is neither a guide for beginners nor an autobiography. It is a piercing, and sometimes shocking, confession of a person whose life’s work is “writing different stories.” It’s a living voice of a writer who, with disarming fearlessness, conducts an experiment to lay bare her soul and her profession. In essence, it’s a novel about the profession—about a life dedicated to creativity, about the writer’s courage, about the creator’s tirelessness. “Literature is always interested only in the most tormenting, and the most hidden. That is the meaning, the flesh and blood of literature.”