Reflection of the Raven

10 hrs. 51 min.

Language Russian

Author Dmitry Veresov

Narrator Vyacheslav Gerasimov

“The Magpies” — a new prose book by Tatyana Shcherbina, whose heroes had to live through a crazy 20th century. Raised in the USSR, at the turn of the century they found themselves in free swimming— and their lives, so familiar and understandable, were turning before their eyes into unreadable “magpies.”

Anyone who has ever encountered wrongly interpreted by a browser encoding will not need an explanation of what “magpies” are. Why is the new prose collection named so? The book is titled after the first—name-giving—story. However, the theme declared in it continues in a somewhat complicated way through the rest of the texts of the book.

“The Magpies” is an entertainingly constructed slice of life of one unhappy family, in which an old professor-philologist cannot find a common language with his former wife—not yet old—and with the son whose successful life suddenly starts going downhill once he begins rummaging through the dirty laundry of an influential statesman. In a sense, the “magpies” are what all the grown-ups (and the grandfather in particular) are taunted with by the little grandson of the main character.

“The Felicita” is about a girl who lived under a curse of the name Felicia, but in the end finds her happiness.

“Mother of Evil” is the story of a self-made girl with a speaking surname who managed to break out of the routine flow of provincial life, get into a metropolitan art school, climb to the tops of the criminal business— and then lost everything and mysteriously disappeared. In fact, the same—or almost the same—happened to the country of great opportunities and new horizons that Russia seemed to the author at the very beginning of the 1990s.

The word chosen for the title is a metaphor describing the existence of each of Shcherbina’s heroes. These are people whom time tries—like files— to open with different programs. Everything around changes rapidly, and the person is alternately lifted onto the crest of a wave and thrown onto the roadside. Yet this person is important and valuable—because the “magpies,” if approached correctly, turn into a clear and often significant text. Shcherbina gives her heroes a chance: bad ducklings, somehow, find their place in life. Here is such a specific humanism: in many contemporary books, the heroes of “The Magpies” would become targets for an author’s quick retribution (or simply would not make it onto the pages). Shcherbina, however, treats her characters with attention and care, returning them to a world that would be much more boring without them—not that it would be great for us in the spaces inhabited exclusively by the cool guys of Prilepin, the grim and criminal little people of Senchin, the abstract constructs of Elizarov and Pelevin.

Shcherbina’s merit is that she painstakingly unravels the intricate threads of these people’s fates—not big, but still small ones. At the same time, she manages, first, to make it not boring at all and not artificial; and second, surprisingly relevant. The author of “The Magpies” tells us that the Soviet past can (and should) be broken down into the smallest components; that operation is necessary so that, in place of meaningless scribbles, clear symbols appear. It turns out to be a kind of conceptual biography of time. The value here isn’t in archaeological digs as such, but in the attempt to extract from what has been found the rhythms and the hum of big history.

Contents:

The Magpies
Two Alphabets
Kuznetsov Porcelain
What a F***ing Mess
Felicita
Motherland of Evil

1. Black Raven (narrated by Dina Grigoryeva) 2. The Raven's Flight (narrated by Lyudmila Larionova) 3. The Raven's Cry (narrated by Yury Zaborovsky) 4. The Raven's Chosen One (narrated by Nikolay Savitskiy) 5. The Wanderings of a Raven (narrated by Yury Zaborovsky) 6. The Raven's Testament (narrated by Yury Zaborovsky) 7. The Temptation of the Raven (narrated by Natalia Litvinova) 9. The Raven. The Shadow of Zarathustra (narrated by Vyacheslav Gerasimov) 10. Reflection of the Raven 11. The Raven Constellation (narrated by Nikolay Savitskiy) 12. The Mystery of the White Lady (narrated by Vladimir Gerasimov) 13. White Tango (narrated by Yury Zaborovsky) 14. The Near Bank of the Nile, or Sentimental Education (narrated by Alexey Kovalev)