ENG / RUS
125х200 (84х108/32)
hard cover, 560 pp., 2013
ISBN 978-5-4448-0094-2
World rights available
Mura’s Love is a novel about forbidden love between two women during one of the darkest and most tragic periods in Russian history — the 1930s and 1940s. The narrative is suff used with vivid details of Soviet daily life at the height of Stalinist socialism. This whole strange story begins in the Crimea, in one of the sanatoriums of the resort of Miskhor, when a Kievan woman named Mura meets Ksyusha from Moscow...
Nikolai Baitov’s work is one of the best and brightest examples of an epistolary novel and continues a tradition in world literature dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, referencing books by Rousseau, Choderlos de Laclos, Goethe and Dostoyevsky.
Nikolai Baitov is a Russian poet, novelist and book artist. In the 1980s he was one of the founders of Epsilon Salon, the famous underground almanac, and organized numerous literary festivals and performances. Baitov’s prose has been translated into Italian and Serbian.
According to legend, Baitov discovered a bundle of Mura’s letters in an abandoned Moscow building in the late 1980s. Gradually he worked through them and now presents them as an artwork under his own name, just like Marcel Duchamp, who turned a urinal into “Fountain”. There’s a name for when artists engage with reality in this way: a ready-made.
Maya Kucherskaya,
Vedomosti
Despite the book’s bold cover and reference to “forbidden” love it does not contain any scandals, provocations or even actual love. Instead it is the heartfelt, extremely frank monologue of a woman who pours out her soul to her only close friend.
Anastasia Rogova,
Argumenty i Fakty
Just recently — sometime in mid-October 2012 — it was 78 years since the day that Mura met Ksyusha (Ksenia Porfiryevna Kurisko). The place of their meeting can be pinned down about as precisely as the time — it was in one of the sanatoriums in Miskhor.
Ksenia Porfi ryevna was by all appearances quite an ordinary woman, and did not stand out in any way from the circle of similarly normal holidaymakers and sanatorium parents — or rather she would not have stood out if she had not been touched by Mura’s love, one of the greatest loves of the 20th century...
