Soviet Childhood. Prisoner of the Fifth Breakwater

Yuri Ilyich Gurfinckel is a doctor, doctor of medical sciences, and writer. He is the author of the book “Still Light Is His Step…,” as well as essays and stories published in magazines “Friendship of Peoples,” “October,” “Russian Life,” and “Banner.” An attentive listener and a wonderful storyteller, Yuri Gurfinckel knew Anastasia Tsvetaeva closely for seventeen years. The book “Not Accidental Encounters” centers on the Tsvetaev family and their contemporaries: Vladimir and Vera Nabokov, Salvador Dalí and Gala, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik, Alexander Chizhevsky… Reconstructed from memory conversations with Anastasia Ivanovna, a joint trip to Holland, meetings with the Nabokovs’ family in Switzerland—this is how the author depicts the passing literary epoch of the 20th century. The edition includes unique photographs. “This double life—serving as a doctor-resuscitator and leisure—devoted to literary work—makes him, in my view, the most valuable, rare, exceptional phenomenon. His mercilessness toward himself, the way he constantly listens to correctness without missing a single hour of reality and without tiring of listening to the melody of fairy-tale that hovers over it, over reality—this melody is what spreads over everything” (Anastasia Tsvetaeva).