Random Meetings. Anastasia Tsvetaeva, Nabokovs, French Evenings

Yuri Ilyich Gurfinkel is a physician, doctor of medical sciences, and writer. He is the author of the book “Still Light on its Feet...” as well as essays and stories published in the magazines “Druzhba Narodov,” “Oktyabr,” “Russian Life,” and “Znamya.” An attentive listener and a wonderful storyteller, Yuri Gurfinkel was closely acquainted with Anastasia Tsvetaeva for seventeen years. The center of the book “Random Meetings” is the Tsvetaev family and their contemporaries: Vladimir and Vera Nabokov, Salvador Dali and Gala, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lily Brick, Alexander Chizhevsky… Restored from memory conversations with Anastasia Ivanovna, a joint trip to Holland, meetings with the Nabokov family in Switzerland — such an author paints the fading literary era of the 20th century. The publication is accompanied by unique photographs. “This double life — serving as a resuscitation physician and leisure — literary work — makes him, in my opinion, a most valuable, rare phenomenon. Ruthlessness to oneself in this constant listening for infallibility, not missing a single hour of reality and not tiring of listening to the melody of fairy-tale-like essence wafting above it, over reality — it prevails over everything” (Anastasia Tsvetaeva).