From the Ship's Log

"In that photograph, I am alone, not counting my uncle on the other side of the lens. It is 1980, wars still rage — on hockey fields, in space, in classrooms, filling us with time and place. How much time... has passed since then! The sea has come, the bay, my beach, my rocks, on which I grew up. Me and the sun." In the prose and poetic texts collected in this book, Alexander Ilichevsky achieves what physics has long sought — to unite the infinitely large and the infinitely small. On the photographic film, consisting of memories of childhood impressions, loves, and other happy moments, is first layered the pain of a collective past, and then — eternity, revealed in nature and biblical images. And then, in the space of one particular book, the flow of history suddenly reveals its internal logic and rhymes, while the shards of a shattered world are glued together into a unified mosaic. Alexander Ilichevsky is a poet, prose writer, and essayist, winner of the "Russian Booker" and "Big Book" awards.