An Unwavering Hand

Elena Kholmogorova (b. 1952, Moscow) is a historian by education, a prose writer, a creative writing teacher, an editor, and head of the prose department at the journal "Znamya". She is the author of eleven books of prose and essays. "An Unwavering Hand" is a book about the intimate. It reflects on childhood in an extraordinary Moscow family, on a poet father, an artist grandfather, and a musician uncle, on friendships, loves, and disappointments, on books—read and published, on music and nature, on extraordinary encounters and travels. It is a chain of confessional, sometimes bright, sometimes bitter reflections on what has come true and what has not, a book about love carried throughout life. "I feel close to the Japanese philosophy of kintsugi—restoration of ceramics with lacquer mixed with gold dust. All the joints, cracks, imperfections not only are not hidden or masked, but are, on the contrary, emphasized and highlighted in gold... And the further you go, the clearer you understand: losses, experiences—this is a part of you, a part of your path: not scars on the body of life, but the art of the golden seam."