Crimea Island

Vasily Aksyonov — one of the iconic Russian writers, whose work became the voice of an entire generation. His prose, brilliant and sharp, responded to the most complex and relevant themes of the era, and therefore remains in demand among contemporary readers. Aksyonov's works are well known not only in Russia but also abroad: they have firmly entered the canon of Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century and continue to reveal new meanings with each rereading.
The central piece of the collection is the famous novel «The Island of Crimea», written in 1977–1979 — even before the author's departure from the USSR. The book first saw the light in the USA in 1981, while Russian readers could only get acquainted with it in 1990. The novel amazed the audience with its bold plot twist: Aksyonov constructs an alternative reality where Crimea is a full-fledged island, and during the Civil War, it falls to the whites. This artistic hypothesis reveals itself not just as a subtle foresight of public sentiments — this is why «The Island of Crimea» is often considered a work with the gift of foresight.
The edition also includes the experimental travel novella «In Search of a Genre» (1972) and the novella «Our Golden Iron» (1973). These texts demonstrate different facets of Aksyonov's prose: from an ironic view of reality to a combination of the mundane and the sublime, confessional and playful. Rich in precise details, they retain the characteristic tone of the author and give the reader a sense of freedom and fullness of existence. The collection allows one to see the evolution of the author's style and to look at the iconic themes of Russian prose in a new way.