Do you love Brahms? With all my heart

Françoise Sagan is a strange star of French literature, an invariably modern classic outside of any modernity. She wrote her stories about love in emptiness, where there are no events in the world, but there is always pleasant pastime, influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. Her stories are clearly inspired by Maupassant. To some extent, she is the literary sister of Salinger, the creative ancestor of Sally Rooney: the microscopic movements of the soul have always interested both her and her characters much more than any external events and personal actions. And yet, in real life, Sagan found herself amidst scandals in the social chronicle, gambling, passionate love, and very substantial reality — for example, the Paris events of 1968. She lived as she pleased in a world where women were still assigned a boring, narrow, subordinate role of "decoration," and all her heroines subtly or openly rebel against such casting: by pretending to play by the rules, sometimes getting overly carried away and even starting to sincerely believe in their own game, they undermine the imposed laws simply by being constantly very aware of them. This collection includes two texts by Sagan: her early novel "Do you love Brahms?" — a story about a woman whose life is being controlled by two men, and "With all my heart" — a rare example of Sagan addressing real life, a collection of deep and witty reflections on everything: television debates, horses, laughter, Catherine Deneuve, George Sand, and Gorbachev.