10,00 

Babel Bookstore Publishing House, Tel Aviv, 2023

ISBN 978-965-93083-1-6

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Autor

Виктор Меламед

Viktor Melamed

Victor Melamed is a shortlisted finalist for the Dar Prize 2025. Artist, writer, teacher, translator

Expert opinions

Евгения Вежлян

Evgeniya Vezhlyan

Poet, literary critic, essayist, literary scholar and sociologist of literature

The reader, rushing into the world of this text like a force field in a fantasy movie, encounters the phenomenon of absolute defamiliarization: he sees a world described from within himself, speaking a distorted language that only superficially resembles our own. The words of the Russian language have forgotten themselves, turned into signs, symbols, speech formulas, frozen like incantations and material like things. Superhumans, subhumans, small animals... They all speak in quotations: some of them from the pop book “1000 Golden Aphorisms”, some from Pushkin (for some reason from “Ruslan and Lyudmila”) (...) Actually, this text is a petri dish of cultural memory. Something grows there, something grows there... And what grows there is absolutely indifferent to whether we can understand it or not.
Лиза Биргер

Elizaveta Birger-Eroğlu

Philologist, translator, literary critic, curator of cultural events, and manager of the bookstore "Poltory Komnaty" in Istanbul

The first artistic text by artist and graphic artist Victor Melamed makes a rather stunning impression - it is an absurdist text whose plot is almost impossible to retell and whose characters seem to be parodies of themselves. In a sense, the moment in which we read this turbulent, unsettling text determines how we inevitably perceive it. The more turbulent the outside, the more unsettling the reading. Yet even in such a small space, Melamed manages to achieve some human dimension to the text, his characters appear sympathetic and alive rather than mere absurdist masks, and the sounding word, even the disintegrating shadows of Pushkin's lines, becomes an incantation of consolation.

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