My literary background

I am now a member of several literary associations, such as MAPP, Canadian Authors’ Association, Quebec Writers’ Federation, etc. I have just been awarded by the Russian Writers’ Union an Anton Chekhov medal for my Russian prose.

All that has happened during the last 2 or 3 years. My 4 Russian books have been published in the USA, by IGRULITA Press.

This year, Xlibris Press has published my English Questions Without Answers, a novel in novellas.

You can ask me when I began writing, and is it only now that have become more or less recognized?

Well, my first literary attempts date back to when I was 15 years old and studied at a Kharkov secondary school. Kharkov is an amazing Ukrainian city, close to the Russian border. Here is the photo of Kharkov’s ‘Mirror Stream’, one of the city’s symbols:

Kharkov is, if I can put it so, a real-life character, an almost living being in my novel ‘Reflection’ presently being translated into English. It’s very difficult to translate my prose, but the translator is doing an incredible job! She even copes with the lines that look absolutely impossible to render in any other language but Russian as I use a lot of metaphors, play on words, etc. She introduces her own metaphors, which are not worse than mine, to say the least.

My first steps were poetry and literary criticism. Can you imagine a 15-year old literary critic? I wrote my essays with a pencil, in a notepad, and I tried to write as much as possible before I turned 16. For me, a 16-year old literary critic was nothing special. I still keep that notepad, and I look into it from time to time. Hopefully, I am a better writer now, but that one had at least 1 advantage: he was younger.

Here is the entrance to the Gorky park:

Can you see the monument of Maxim Gorky, a famous Russian author, behind those columns? The main characters of ‘Reflection’, Klara and Samuil, were fond of walking there, passing by the Gorky monument, down to the Dynamo stadium. It was in the 1930s and 40s, which ‘Reflection’ is about.

Ans this is one of the great Ukrainian Baroque cathedrals in Kharkov:

If you are interested, I will tell you more in the following posts.