Translated material
Seventeen centuries until spring. Lisa Birger - about the new book by Anna Starobinets
In the spring, the Ripol publishing house published a new book by one of the main Russian-language writers of the 21st century - “Chronicles of the Ash Spring” by Anna Starobinets. Starobinets needed to move the action of the novel 17 centuries forward in order to be able to talk about good and evil without taking sides in current conflicts. Lisa Birger advises Starobinets to carefully read the new book.
Anna Starobinets’s book “Chronicles of the Ash Spring” is at the same time a dystopia with elements of a detective story, a topical commentary carefully pushed into the future to the safe 17th centuries, and a fairy tale without the possibility of a happy ending. This impossibility of certainty, moral rightness, and a clear division of good and evil, built into the text—and indeed into the context of our lives today—at once makes her new text fascinating, complex, and slightly frightening. The only thing that can be said about it for sure is that it will be continued.
Anna Starobinets is one of the most significant figures in Russian genre prose, a writer who feels equally confident in the genres of mystical thriller, folk horror, dystopia, dark fantasy and even a children's detective story with elements of noir. Her books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and in 2018 she was chosen as the best writer in Europe by the Congress of the European Science Fiction Society.
Moreover, in the last decade before the full-scale invasion, adult fiction was not at all the main genre through which Starobinets communicated with readers - the “Beastly Detective” series for children, projects for television and the documentary novel “Look at Him” about the birth of a stillchild were much more popular. One of her last fiction books for adults was the dystopian “Living,” published in 2011, about a future in which humanity has become a single organism connected to the global network directly through the brain - and either dissolved in digital happiness, or completely capitulated to the digital Gulag.
Book from the “Beastly Detective” series by Anna Starobinets
Starobinets's great novel, which her fans had been waiting for more than 10 years, was released in the summer of 2022, when the need for it was greater than ever - by default, any complex novel was perceived as explaining and commenting on reality. Moreover, “Fox Fords” is a truly big book. This 700-page novel is based on a TV script with the ambitions of a Russian Game of Thrones, which Anna wrote together with her husband, writer Alexandre Garros (he died of cancer in 2017). In troubled times, “Fox Fords” was read as the possibility of another story - other events around, another fairy tale, another morality. This, of course, was escapism - but at the same time, the story told in “Fox Fords” returned the reader to himself, transforming, complementing and showing him his reality. “Chronicles of the Ash Spring” in comparison with this book seems to be a much more personal project, incomparably more modern and very sad.
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