Novellas

10 hrs. 51 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Henry James

Narrator Svetlana Repina

Description

The publishing house Tekst released four novellas by the classic of American literature Henry James, previously unpublished in Russian, in a collection titled “The Madonna of the Future.” All of them are united to one degree or another by a single theme. It can probably be defined this way: the artist and his unrealized possibilities. In the first novella—which gave the whole volume its title—the story is about an artist, an American who came to Florence. He made the creation of a masterpiece, the painting of a madonna, the goal of his life. In this picture he intended to combine everything once discovered by the great painters. In the second novella, “The Middle Years,” the main character is a writer who only in the decline of life truly realized his artistic gift. He hopes he will be granted a “second term,” another opportunity to reveal his talent. However, he is mortally ill and understands that this “second term” is nothing more than an illusion. The third novella, “The Coxon Fund,” tells of a certain great man whose genius came to nothing as soon as it reached the point of publication. Finally, one more novella—“The Papers”—is also devoted to a kind of talent, the talent to fabricate a celebrity out of nothing.

Contents:

The Madonna of the Future (translator: Maria Shereshevskaya)
The Middle Years (translator: Tatyana Chernysheva)
The Coxon Fund (translator: Sergey Sukharev)
The Papers (translator: Maria Shereshevskaya)