Volume 11

The next one - already the eleventh - volume of the complete works of Dina Rubina. It includes the well-known novel "The White Dove of Cordoba" - in a new authorial edition. And a specially created introductory essay by the... author for this volume. "The daughter of an artist, the wife of an artist, - I have been spinning in the world of canvases and paints all my life, constantly stumbling over the set easel, always complaining about the abundance of stretchers and bottles of thinners... It has all been mine since childhood: I am both the model, and the cleaner, I am both the listener and the viewer. Seriously believing that I know absolutely everything in this field, I began to think about the plot... Once, my husband and I found ourselves in the company of auctioneers and experts. It was a noisy and amusing feast: dozens of auction stories. It was such a time, the beginning of the century, when the auction houses of Europe and the world were overwhelmed with skillful forgeries of Russian artists: Shishkin, Serov, Levitan and Korovin, Kuindzhi... well and Malevich and Kandinsky, of course, in short - for every taste. And each of the guests, interrupting one another, rushed to tell another incredible, anecdotal, or even criminal story. In those years, the scandalous trial of the artist Van Meegeren was already widely known, who had been successfully forging the paintings of great artists for decades, leaving art experts fooled. We traveled home in complete silence. I pondered what I had heard, and my husband was also silent about something. Is it really that easy to deceive experts? - I finally asked Boris. Experts - easy, - he replied thoughtfully. - Few of them truly understand the profound, masterful essence of art. All those guys you saw today are just former boys and girls from the art history department. None of them knows what happens to the paints when you mix them on a palette, and then, what happens to them on the canvas, after about a hundred years."