The Blue Window of Theocritus

The author of eccentric avant-garde prose, beautifully cruel stories about the peoples of the Far North, and astonishing blockade poetry, Gennady Gor began writing science fiction in the 1960s. It is commonly believed that genre literature became a safe niche for the reformed and ambition-abandoned avant-gardist. This is an injustice. Despite their apparent naivety, these texts are intricately structured. Using the apparatus of science fiction, Gor writes romantic tales about time-lost wanderers—just like the writer himself, who miraculously survived the catastrophes of the 1930s-40s that destroyed his teachers and friends. There is not a word about the catastrophes in Gor's tales, but the hidden point of their growth is the collapse of linear time in history and life, forever casting the survivor into a nonlinear existence. Such is the work written in 1967, «The Blue Window of Theocritus»—a fantastic elegy in which the inhabitants of the 22nd century yearn for ancient Alexandria, robots read the poems of Mikhail Kuzmin, and memory becomes a person's only partner, beloved, and jailer. The trajectory of the illustrations by Ekaterina Khasina originates from the same source—a fragile plasticity of European romanticism. The graphics do not capture the plot of Gor's prose but amplify the breaking and swirling time of his text.