Teacher Dymov

"Save yourself from involvement in a rough state game—follow the call of the heart. About the life of a private person changing the world through small deeds, who doesn’t want to be drawn into the crude play of government. About a dream. About a love that happens only once in a lifetime. About parents, whose value people realize only when they’re gone"

In the first half of the nineties, Sergey Kuznetsov worked in philology: he wrote a monograph on the poetics of Joseph Brodsky (a nomination for the Andrei Bely Prize), studied the works of Thomas Pynchon (and later wrote commentaries for Russian translations of the novels “V” and “The Crying of Lot Forty-Nine”), translated Stephen King and Susan Sontag, and published in thick literary magazines.

Nina falls face-first into the snow—and immediately a sharp pain shoots through her legs, crimson circles swim before her eyes. Has she broken something? How will she get back? Or maybe it’s her head spinning from hunger, hence the circles—and the pain in her leg is so bad as if an old rusty nail has been driven into her ankle—so she only needs to stand up and everything will be fine, she’ll keep going, and everything will be fine; she’ll pick more lingonberry leaves, and everything will be fine; and she’ll return home to her wife.

Only she needs to lie down a little and gather her strength…