Having started writing in the 1960s, Andrey Bitov first summed up his work in the 90s and has done it many times since then in the status of a living classic. Everything that he has ever written is, in fact, hypertext, one life-long book.
Having started writing in the 1960s, Andrey Bitov first summed up his work in the 90s and has done it many times since then in the status of a living classic. Everything that he has ever written is, in fact, hypertext, one life-long book. And how long life will last, so much the text will be written. Bitov collects and recomposes a single whole from parts written in different years. The new editions are an experience of this kind.
Volume Zero contains the early stories, but in a different combination, the first novel and the first screenplay, the first «our biography» and the first poems. There is Bitov, a Leningrader, who fled to Moscow in search of literary recognition (the period of the Higher Script Courses), Bitov, a metropolitan resident in the expanses of Central Asia (the period of the Mining Institute), and the extravagant, controversial fashionable prose writer Bitov, a complex nature — against the backdrop of Kamchatka volcanoes and harsh volcanologists .
In addition to Bitov himself, Bitov also has Pushkin. If Bitov does not write about Bitov, then he writes about Pushkin. Or at the same time — about himself and Pushkin. Starting with the Pushkin House (1964-1971), he builds his miraculous monument to Pushkin: a novel, essays and comments on Pushkin’s poems, diaries and drawings, the musical project «Pushkin Jazz» and a completely man-made monument to the hare — the savior of the Sun of Russian poetry — in Mikhailovsky . In September, «Pushkin’s Volume» will be released — the summary result of 50 years of Bitov’s Pushkin studies.
A. Bitov «Volume Zero».
AST, Editorial by Elena Shubina. 464 p.