Heroes and Heroines. Egeria. Magical Tales

The collection of artistic prose by Pavel Muratov (1881–1950) — art historian, essayist, translator, primarily known to contemporary readers for his three-volume work «Images of Italy» — includes texts written during 1915–1925, the most intense decade in Muratov's biography. This period encompassed military service in the Sevastopol fortress, life in Soviet Moscow, and emigration to Berlin and Rome. Muratov's fiction is built on the intersection and interpretation of diverse influences — Italian Renaissance novellas, Pushkin's prose, 19th-century English essayism, German romantics, French symbolists. The action of the cycle of stories «Heroes and Heroines» unfolds in different eras and countries; more than historical reconstructions, Muratov is attracted to reflections on man in the historical environment, on the interconnection of events and legends. In «Magical Tales», fantastic elements of modernity are explored. Finally, the large novel «Egeria», written from the perspective of a fictional 18th-century Italian engraver, a student of Piranesi, combines an adventurous plot with a peculiar chronicle of the artist's formation. The publication is accompanied by extensive historical and literary commentary and an article by philologist Vsevolod Zelchenko.