Thief, Spy and Assassin

Yuri Buita is the author of the novels "Gift of Speech" and "Fifth Kingdom", the collection of stories "Prussian Bride" and other books published in Russia, France, Great Britain, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Norway. In the novel "Thief, Spy... and Assassin" (winner of the "Big Book" award), the hero stubbornly pursues a profession as a writer – "the craft of a thief, spy, and assassin. The writer peeks, eavesdrops, steals other people's traits and words, and then transfers all of this to paper, stopping moments, as Goethe said, that is – killing the living for the sake of the beautiful…" A completely different time (1950s–1980s) – and a completely different place (the intoxicating life of small towns in the Kaliningrad region, the former Prussia); a memory that "the world lies in evil", a list of deadly sins, human baseness, and cruelty – and at the same time the ability to see divine beauty in all of this; love, passion, and death – everything converged on the pages of this novel.