Open Your Eyes

The Booker Prize-winning author Julian Barnes is one of the brightest and most original prose writers of contemporary Britain, the author of such international bestsellers as "The Noise of Time", "The Sense of an Ending", "Arthur & George", "A History of the World in 10½ Chapters", "Flaubert's Parrot", and many others.

As his first experience in the genre of art essays, Julian Barnes refers to the chapter from the controversial dystopian novel "A History of the World in 10½ Chapters" (1989), dedicated to the painting by Théodore Géricault "The Raft of Medusa". That is why, as an independent work, it appears first in the collection "Open Your Eyes" as one of the fascinating short stories about artists and their works, inviting the reader to trace the path of visual art from the early 19th century to the present day.

These essays contain everything that is traditionally characteristic of Barnes's prose: a magnificent sense of style, a virtuosic balance of biting irony and refined lyricism, sarcasm on the brink of cynicism and cheerful mischief. But this collection also includes subtle, witty, and sometimes unexpected observations that provide not only literary pleasure but also rich food for thought.

The current edition includes seven new essays on 19th-century art that are published for the first time in Russian translation.