The Great Love of Olenka Dyakova

The book “Olyonka Dyakovа’s Great Love” brings together fate stories united by streets and rivers of Petersburg–Petrograd–Leningrad, its courtyard courtyards, parades, and black staircases. And the City itself—full-fledged and the main character of each tale—twists, performs shamanistic rites, drives characters through itself like blood through veins, growing into them…

A talented student of the Imperial Medical Academy who risks performing an unusual operation under someone else’s name; a serf laundress trying to remove a stain from her mistress-general’s expensive shawl using “Gypsy methods”; a model from the Academy of Arts who dares to pass himself off as a painter; a young gymnasium student who invents a wonderful image for herself—and falls in love with it…

Everything here is unstable, everything is substituted, everything is a mirage… And only the City—the ever-lasting Petersburg—remains unchanging in its mystical power over each of its inhabitants.

“Svеtlana Volkova’s prose is like a little time machine—carrying us into the past, which somehow turns out not to be so far away. Tender, precise, magical book,” says Anna Matveeva.

“Svеtlana Volkova takes the reader by the hand and leads them to Silver Age Petersburg—now to an anatomical theater, now to an art studio, and sometimes to a cemetery… Her stories—of astonishing charm, like walking through a bygone era—are kept in the traditions of Russian prose of the First World War times, where the objects are only hinted at (Bunin, Kuprin, Bely, Chekhov, Andreev), but you can never be sure—and that, too, is part of the game,” Vladislav Tolstov says.