Larionov's Notes

The landowner Larionov had both a happy childhood on his parents’ estate and schooling in a cadet corps, and military service under Arakcheev, and a quiet life of a country gentleman, and time in government bureaucracy in a provincial city. His destiny could have interested Pushkin, Goncharov, or Turgenev… but the plot was picked up—two hundred years later—by Mikhail Shishkin. This Larionov is disabled, crushed by the passing of the Great Russian Literature: the deceived station-master… (LEV DANILKIN)

“I love all of Russian literature—both Nabokov and Chernyshevsky… Russian literature is indivisible, like a beloved woman—you love all its parts. Every writer is only a leaf on a tree. And the juices reach it through roots, trunk, branches. Up to the end of the 19th century—that’s the trunk that feeds the crown, then branching begins. My branch is Chekhov, Bunin, Nabokov, Sasha Sokolov.” (MIKHAIL SHISHKIN)