The book by the famous writer and literary critic Pavel Basinsky, “No Violin Needed,” is a collection of literary portraits: from Pushkin and Turgenev to Prilepin and Grishkovets.
Why didn’t two great contemporaries meet—Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? What do Camus’s “Myth of Sisyphus” and Gorky’s poem “Man” have in common? Why does the butterfly from Varlam Shalamov’s story “ask questions far more terrible than the famous butterfly in Bradbury””? What did the poet Boris Ryzhy—singer of the murky nineties—tell us before he died, like Lermontov, at the age of twenty-six? What is the secret of Boris Akunin’s success—and why don’t you necessarily have to read Viktor Pelevin’s latest novels to the end?