Andrey Bitov wrote the novel The Symmetry Teacher for almost forty years — or rather, he didn’t write, but “translated from a foreign language”: according to the author, in his youth he came across a book by some unknown Englishman, telling about another writer — also unknown.
In reflected light
Andrey Bitov wrote the novel The Symmetry Teacher for almost forty years — or rather, he didn’t write, but “translated from a foreign language”: according to the author, in his youth he came across a book by some unknown Englishman, telling about another writer — also unknown. Subsequently, the book was lost, and Bitov decided to restore from memory rather than actually translate the lost original. However, this entire fictitious construction is nothing more than a complex system of mirrors in which familiar objects acquire a different weight, meaning and volume. The writer Urbino Vanoski (either a hero, or one of the authors of this strange book), in pursuit of a disembodied haze, loses his only love, after which he actually dies in the flesh: from now on, the border between the surrounding reality and the books that he composes is for him is erased. Life flows directly into the text and back. The novel is composed of separate chapters-short stories that tell about love and loss, about memory and oblivion, about loneliness and fantasy. Incredibly beautiful, intelligent and refined, Bitov’s prose appeals more to intellect than to feelings. However, by making phenomena that we often perceive through the prism of emotions an object of reflection and analysis, the author achieves a striking effect: the optical settings change slightly, the angle of view subtly shifts, and suddenly we see in what is happening around us not at all what we are used to and expected. see. And the result of this is at first a slight dizziness, and then an exciting feeling of crystal clarity, logic and transparency of everything that our eyes turn to.
Fortune El, 408 p.