Keeper of Antiquities

Yuri Dombrovsky 1909–1978 — a prose writer, poet, who went through several arrests, camps, exiles and did not break. Author of the novels "The Monkey Comes for Its Skull", "Keeper of Antiquities", "The Faculty of Useless Things", "Birth of a... Mouse". The novel "Keeper of Antiquities", started in exile in Alma-Ata, is considered almost autobiographical. A young employee of the local history museum Zybina, an intellectual loner, is engaged in collecting and sorting ancient artifacts, while an unclear but palpable fear becomes part of everyday life. Completed in 1964, the novel was published at the end of the thaw and was immediately translated in the West, causing a stir there. Domestic criticism simply "did not notice" it. "I am primarily a keeper of antiquities, and who are they? I am an archaeologist, I climbed the bell tower and sit on it, sorting out the Paleolithic, bronze, ceramics, determining shards and not getting down to you at all. Fifty-five meters from the ground — this is no joke! What do you want from me?" And they answer me: "History is your personal business, you fool. And you can't escape from it — neither to the tower, nor to the basement, nor to the Bronze Age, nor to the Iron Age, nor into the skin of an archaeologist. We have long understood why you climbed up there."