The Extermination of Persians

”At some point our words, our thoughts about culture and literature, Russian and world, these endless citations, these attempts at understanding — began to demand an outlet; it was time to transfer our conversations to paper. We agreed to write... dialogues. Not essays, not articles, but dialogues — about everything in the world that seems necessary, important. And so, sipping tea with thyme, we shuffled through everything, head to head, built scenarios, wandered through the paths and nooks of Russian literature, and not only…” In the witty, subtle, brilliant conversations of writer Tatiana Tolstaya and film critic, essayist, cult figure of the underground Alexander Timofeevsky, transitions from Stenka Razin — to Bunin, and from Pushkin and Chekhov — to drinking songs occur easily and naturally; memories of the harsh life of the nineties intertwine with the story of the Streltsy uprising of 1682 and Peter I's flight to Trinity in 1689, here East and West, Eros and Thanatos, food and corporeality converge, while Yesenin and Vysotsky coexist with Prigov and Hrzhanovsky's “Dau”... The book also includes texts from friends and close ones of Timofeevsky: Tatyana Moskvin, Sergey Nikolayevich, Lev Lurie, Yuri Saprykin, Ivan Davydov, Alexey Zimin, Olga Tobrelyuts, Dmitry Olshansky, Andrey Plakhov, Dmitry Vodennikov, Elena Posvyatovskaya, Elena Veselaya and many others recalled what “Shura was like”.