March, October, Malva

“Lyuba Makarevskaya's autofiction is a scorching conversation about sexuality and emotional dependence, about attempts at salvation and self-discovery. Readers may regard this prose as an invitation to 'know another' — too closely, too intimately, too awkwardly for 'comfortable reading.' But the focus is that there is already another — the dog Malva. Her world is closed to us — but she is always nearby. We do not know what she understands about the lives of those around her, but her presence deepens this life, and the sensual prose becomes, paradoxically, chaste and hermetic. And if the reader does not 'know another' — because a person never tells everything, after all! — they will recognize the time in which Malva and Lyuba lived, longed for, and loved alongside them. A time of fear, separations; a time of sex and books; a time of epigraphs from different planets,” — Lev Oborin, poet, literary critic.