The love story that Elena Komarova tells is in a completely different spirit. She is a teacher of literature, he is a somewhat sick young man named Dimych, a freak who goes without a coat in winter, selflessly works in a center for helping troubled teenagers and prisoners, learns to play the button accordion.
The love story that Elena Komarova tells is in a completely different spirit. She is a teacher of literature, he is a somewhat sick young man named Dimych, a freak who goes without a coat in winter, selflessly works in a center for helping troubled teenagers and prisoners, learns to play the button accordion. They live happily, but not for long. I don’t know how Komarova does it, but her heart stops at every suggestion. Maybe because they are very short and without snot, such naked and direct prose. “We sat in silence, and the janitor in the yard scrubbed the street. Dimych said that he needed to go to sleep: he put his head on the table and immediately fell asleep. I sat next to him and looked at him. He had a piercingly bitter expression. He breathed calmly, and his ears shone through from the lamp. <...> At night, I could not check the essays and did not understand what they were about. The story was published only in the Znamya magazine and on the Web.
SIGN, 2011, No. 4; http://magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2011/4/ko4.html
Maya Kucherskaya