The Board of Dionysius

The early 1970s. An old, once gubernatorial city several hundred kilometers from Moscow. Art history candidate Anna, who has recently defended her dissertation on the works of icon painter Dionysius, learns that a sixteenth-century icon has gone missing from a nearby monastery. Anna rushes off in pursuit of the vanished image of the Savior, unaware that these are traces on blood.

Alexei Smirnov von Rauch (1937-2009) made an indelible impression on the regulars of the Yuzhinsky circle with his prose in the 1960s and on modernism enthusiasts in the Czech Republic and Germany with his painting. Breaking ties with the outside world, Smirnov spent thirty years within the walls of churches and hermitages, restoring frescoes and observing the parallel life of Soviet society, where the suffocating struggle intertwined the surviving descendants of the nobility, runaway monks, enterprising tourists, declassed elements, and the ubiquitous officers of the security services. The captivating, truthful, and therefore all the more brutal novel 'The Board of Dionysius' was written in 1976 for the drawer without prospects for publication. A lost masterpiece of Russian literature, it convincingly shows that the central questions of life in Russia have not changed in fifty years, nor in five hundred.