The Great Guslyar Volume 1

Kira Bulichov (1934–2003) — a Soviet and Russian writer, translator, screenwriter, and Orientalist, well known to many fans of science fiction. His creative pseudonym Igor Vsevolodovich Mojeiko was composed from the name of his wife Kira Soshinskaya and his mother's maiden name — Maria Bulichova. Mojeiko was born in Moscow. In childhood, the boy loved to read, particularly he was fascinated by the works of such science fiction writers as Alexander Belyaev and Ivan Efremov. After finishing school, Mojeiko entered the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages, where he learned English and Burmese. Later, he graduated from the postgraduate program at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences and remained there to work. Mojeiko defended his candidate and doctoral dissertations on the history of Burma, engaged in translations, and wrote historical and geographical essays for various magazines. In academic circles, Igor Vsevolodovich was known for his publications on the history of Southeast Asia. The writer published his science fiction stories and novellas exclusively under a pseudonym: in the academic environment, science fiction literature was considered light literature, and Mojeiko could face condemnation from colleagues. Igor Vsevolodovich's literary activity was characterized by diversity: he published scientific works, journalistic articles, and artistic works. He had a particular weakness for cycles of writings uniting common heroes, locations, or themes. Among them are the series about Doctor Vladislav Pavlysh, about the resourceful girl from the future Alice, and about the extraordinary city of the Great Guslyar, where reality is closely intertwined with fantasy. The prototype of the Great Guslyar was Veliky Ustyug, which Bulichov visited even before he began to engage in artistic literature. The city impressed the writer so much that several years later he captured its appearance in his first story from the Guslyar series — "Connections of a Personal Nature." Since then, for a long period, Bulichov continued to release stories and novellas about the marvelous city and the extraordinary people living there.

Bulichov wrote about the Great Guslyar for several decades. The changes that occurred during this time in the life of both the author himself and the entire country could not but affect the Guslyar stories. The themes of Bulichov's stories and his understanding of fantasy have also changed. Nevertheless, in Guslyar, readers still await familiar heroes, alien forms of life, a game of dominoes, and many other signs of the Guslyar's phantasmagoric reality.

The first volume of the collected works about the Great Guslyar includes sixty stories and three novellas by Bulichov.