New Book
2020 · 118

The Earth

Categories: Contemporary   Language: Russian
Publication date: 2019 September   Pages: 784
Rights Available: Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh,
Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Pakistan.


【Feature】
★The book has won THE RUSSIAN NATIONAL BESTSELLER PRIZE 2020! Finalist of Russian Big Book Awards 2020!
★Mikhail Yelizarov's latest literary achievement! It has been a long-awaited new work for ten years!
★Rights already sold to Hungary! Japan, France, Britain, the Netherlands copyright in hot negotiations!
★Never has anyone explored the subject of death in such depth as in Mikhail Yelizarov's . It is a complex and profound psychodrama, full of detail every minute! It is also a philosophical novel that opens the door to mystery and the unknown world.
★English chapter available.


【Description】
The life of Vladimir Krotyshev, narrator of The Earth, has been strangely connected with death, funerals in particular, since early childhood. As Vladimir faces a decisive turning point in his career and life, he reconstructs a series of events from his childhood and youth that defi ne his choice. First there was an assignment as a gravedigger from a fellow kindergarten student; together they buried dead insects and rodents they discovered on the playground. His next encounter with death was when fellow students at summer camp challenged him to visit a graveyard at night – it was during this experience that Vladimir realized he, too, will die. The first grave that Vladimir dug by himself was a side assignment during army service in a construction regiment – it took him nearly 16 hours to dig the frozen earth for the grave of their captain's late relative.

However, it is not until Vladimir meets his stepbrother Nikita and Nikita's girlfriend Alina that death becomes a life-long preoccupation.
Nikita Krotyshev, a 40-year-old man with a criminal background, has bought a workshop for funeral monuments and other accessories in Zagorsk, a small town in the Moscow region. At his stepbrother's invitation, Vladimir arrives in Zagorsk to work as Nikita's assistant and supervisor in the family's funeral company. Vladimir soon fi nds himself at the epicenter of a local funeral business, where competition between private companies is heated and often armed. In his zigzag career in the funeral business, Vladimir shifs positions, serving as a manager in a monuments workshop, a gravedigger, and even a bodyguard for funeral agents. Nikita's girlfriend Alina, a graduate student in linguistics, is obsessed with the concept of death. With advanced philosophical interests that stretch beyond fundamental works by Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, and elaborate esoteric practices from the past,
Alina is the de facto mastermind behind Nikita's business. When Vladimir decides to join his brother's business, he cannot foresee that he will fall in love with Alina and that this maddening secret love aff air, richly spiced with philosophical and ethical studies, will not only bring their business partnership to an abrupt and painful end, but also strongly compromise Vladimir's sanity and even his life.

This complex sophisticated work of fiction from the Russian Booker-winning Elizarov is at once a convincing psychological drama and a philosophical and religious narrative. Quotidian conversations intermingle with existential discourse, and routine daily events go hand-in-hand with the narrator's esoteric observations. The author familiarizes us with down-to-earth, often naïve and superstitious beliefs of common people and regular graveyard workers, introducing the reader to up-to-date highbrow philosophies on death and burial culture in the Russian intellectual landscape. Invoking every minute picturesque detail, Mikhail Elizarov depicts the peculiar landscape of the Russian graveyard - with its drooping mounds and monuments of all sizes and forms decorated with Soviet-style stars, Orthodox crosses, and photographic images of the deceased in obligatory oval frames that look out at visitors - as a gate to a mystical inside of this world.

Confronting the high and the low, combining the story of his protagonist with philosophical and religious observations, Elizarov creates a novel that is at once deep and darkly comic, where a mystical inside sporadically erupts into the real world, while ordinary characters shift into devilish Doppelgänger selves, and Nikolai Gogol, Søren Kierkegaard, and Yuri Mamleev laughingly wink at the knowing reader from the novel's pages.  Read More

【Author】

SMikhail Elizarov
WINNER OF THE RUSSIAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008!
Mikhail Elizarov was born in 1973 in Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine. He studied philology in Kharkov State University and fi lm direction in the Fine Arts Academy. In the late nineties Mikhail worked as a cameraman.
In 2001 he continued studying in Germany, where he now lives. He contributes to a number of newspapers and magazines, such as Playboy, GQ, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Mikhail is the author of prize-winning novels (The Earth (2020), Pasternak, Librarian, The Cartoons) and several collections of short stories. All of them were nominated for major literary prizes.

If you are interested in the above book we represent exclusively and would like to inquire about translation rights, please contact us.
RIGHTOL Asia Team
Tel:+86-28-86183888
Email: asia@rightol.com
Add:A-1408,No.98 Guanghua North Third Road,Qingyang District, Chengdu, China
Web:www.rightol.com/en
 
Copyright © 2020 RIGHTOL

RIGHTOL is a leading book content provider in China and even Asia founded in 2006. It always dedicates to assisting outstanding works' publication and distribution around the world. It provides international copyrights agency service for the publishers, agency service for the authors, book's trade service, and cultural exchange service. Now its businesses have reached to more than 50 countries and areas with over 70 employees.