Great love of Olenka Dyakova

The book “The Great Love of Olenka Dyakova” contains stories-fates, united by the streets and rivers of St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad, its courtyards-wells, front and back staircases. And the City itself, the full-fledged and main character of each of the stories, twists, shamanizes, drives the characters through itself like blood through veins, grows into them... A talented student of the Imperial Medical Academy, who risked carrying out an unusual operation under an assumed name; a serf laundress trying to remove a stain from the expensive shawl of her mistress-general using “gypsy methods”; a sitter from the Academy of Arts who dared to pass himself off as an artist; a young schoolgirl who came up with a beautiful image for herself - and fell in love with it... Here everything is unsteady, everything is substitutable, everything is a mirage... And only the City, only eternal Petersburg is unchanged in its mystical power over each of its inhabitants. "Svetlana Volkova's prose - like a small time machine - takes us to the past, which miraculously turns out to be not so distant. A gentle, accurate, magical book." Anna Matveeva “Svetlana Volkova takes the reader by the hand and leads him to St. Petersburg of the Silver Age - either to the anatomical theater, then to the art studio, or even to the cemetery... Her stories are amazingly charming walks through a bygone era - in the traditions of Russian prose of the First World War ", where objects are only guessed at (Bunin, Kuprin, Bely, Chekhov, Andreev), but you can never be sure - and this is also part of the game." Vladislav Tolstov