Unexpected Meetings. Anastasia Tsvetaeva, the Nabokovs, French Evenings

Yuri Il'ich Gurfinkel' — doctor, PhD in medical sciences, writer. Author of the book “The Walk is Still Light…” as well as essays and stories published in the magazines “Friendship of Peoples,” “October,” “Russian Life,” “Banner.” A keen listener and a wonderful storyteller, Yuri Gurfinkel' was closely acquainted with Anastasia Tsvetaeva for seventeen years. The focus of the book “Unexpected Meetings” is the Tsvetaev family and their contemporaries: Vladimir and Vera Nabokov, Salvador Dali and Gala, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lily Brik, Alexander Chizhevsky… Conversations with Anastasia Ivanovna restored from memory, a joint trip to Holland, meetings with the Nabokov family in Switzerland — such an author depicts the fading literary era of the 20th century. The publication is accompanied by unique photographs. “This double life — being a doctor-resuscitator and leisure — literary work — makes him, in my opinion, an invaluable, rare phenomenon. Ruthlessness towards oneself in this constant listening to infallibility, not missing a single hour of reality and tirelessly listening to the melody of fairy-taleness blowing over it, over reality, — it blows over everything” (Anastasia Tsvetaeva).