The Gadfly

The novel "The Gadfly" by English writer Ethel Lilian Voynich was first published in June 1897 in New York; two months later it was released in London, and six months later in Russia, with the translation into Russian being the first. The book immediately gained popularity: it made an impression on millions of readers, one that was indelible through years and other impressions. Meanwhile, little was known about the author herself; in her homeland, E. L. Voynich was forgotten, and people did not even know if she was still alive.

In the early 1950s, Soviet writer and literary scholar Evgenia Taratuta set out to find the author of her favorite novel: for her, the courageous Gadfly, who maintained loyalty to his beliefs until his last breath, was also a companion in life, a support in difficult days. She searched for a long time — and found her! The forgotten writer lived in a small apartment on the seventeenth floor of a dull gray building in New York, and she was approaching her 92nd year. Thus, at the sunset of her days, E. L. Voynich learned of her worldwide fame, unknown to her until then… During the search, it was possible to establish why the work of the English writer about the Italian revolutionary found its homeland in Russia (a fragment of E. Taratuta's book "In the Footsteps of 'The Gadfly'" is included in this publication).

In 1966, on the eve of the anniversary of the October Revolution, the novel "The Gadfly" was released as a gift edition with illustrations by Savva Brodsky. On the white binding, at the very bottom, there was a symbol: the trace of a bullet and streaks of blood, "seeping" onto the endpaper. "'The Gadfly' is prose in which the intensity of true passions is strangely combined with salon quality," the artist said. "I tried to avoid this. In the preliminary pages, I provided a background of events, landscapes of Calabria, and architectural settings. And in the spreads, I depicted the main conflicts in their sharp dynamics, emphasizing the harsh inner world of the main character, drawing the reader's attention to the beliefs of the Gadfly, and not to the sentimental story of his love for Gemma."