Shells. Cubes

Mikhail Elizarov is a prose writer, musician, and author of the novels “Earth” (National Bestseller award), “The Librarian” (Russian Booker award), “Pasternak,” and “Cartoons,” as well as collections “Nails” (shortlisted for the Andrei Bely award), “We went out for a smoke for 17 years” (readers’ vote prize of the “NOS” award), and “Buratini.”

These are not “stories” so much as deliberately accentuated pieces showing the traces of their own “construction.” In other words, there are four different mechanisms for assembling text: from the most traditional one, aspiring to autobiographical authenticity, to the “experimental” one—of course, in the author’s understanding. A hundred years ago, the formalists studied the so-called device as a self-sufficient essence of a text. Before the reader are four different devices, four forms. Four essences. Four shells.

“Cubes” are gray panels where, by magic notions and police protocols, people live. The cubes are not a place of residence, but Language and Mind. The cubes are cruel and tender dreams written in graph paper notebooks.” — MIKHAIL ELIZAROV.