The Third Stage

The stories of Lyuba Makarevskaya can be classified as the prose of a poet – the author is indeed a poet and handles the Russian language like an experienced trainer handles a tiger. It can also be judged by the... degree of sincerity, candor, and the desire to see clearly the things that are practically impossible to look at directly, which are painful, shameful, frightening, that is, to perceive them as an extremely serious conversation about the most important things. «Lyuba Makarevskaya writes about pain, death, love, and memory as if she is lending the reader her gaze, body, and some tiny flickering fragment of her soul; while reading her, you are always inside something that is simultaneously you and not you. Her amazing gift of describing emotional dissociation without textual dissociation, remaining both inside and simultaneously outside – a kind of magical effect of a snow globe. Lyuba writes with sharp snowflakes and her own blood on this glass her messages to us and the world – reading them is a little painful, but this pain heals». — Tatyana Zamirovskaya, author of the novel Death.net «The opening quote from Sabina Spielrein is, of course, not accidental. There is a special line of women's writing: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Wurtzel. Lyuba Makarevskaya consciously follows in their footsteps. This is, first and foremost, a book about self-destruction and the desire for Thanatos». — Olga Breininger, writer «If we imagine that all shadows converge at one point, will this point be merely the impossibility of any truth? And do I ultimately not want the fire to erase my greed along with the insatiability of my vision? And again, lying on the bed, I close my eyes and embrace the darkness, holding within me the gazes, skin, and expressions of others – all those with whom I have been connected over the past months, and I finally disappear. My vision becomes greater than myself, it erases me, like a sea wave on the verge of either nuclear war or Russian winter, which for consciousness is almost always the same».