Черное зеркало

by Yuriy Mamleev

Биография русского писателя и философа Юрия Мамлеева (род. в 1931 году) вместила в себя почти все опознавательные знаки судьбы художника в тоталитарном обществе: затворничество, писание в стол, хула, изнгнание, жизнь в эмиграции. Там, на Западе, он был принят сначала в американский, потом во французский ПЕН - клуб, о его книгах стали писать литературоведы - слависты, находя в них сходство с Достоевским и Гоголем. Проза Юрия Мамлеева - удивительный сплав гротеска и глубокой философичности: шокирующие, эпатажные тексты с элементами мистики. Его герои - странные, а порой и страшные люди, люди - монстры, живущие в столь же странном и страшном мире, но одновременно все они - своеобразные мыслители, путешественники в Великое Неизвестное.

302 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Born in 1931 in Moscow, Yuri Mamleyev began writing in the 1960s. During that time, the author led a “double life.” By day, he taught mathematics, but in the evenings he hosted a secret circle of intellectuals. Discussing Indian and German philosophy, theosophy and psychoanalysis, the members of this undercover literary and philosophical circle called themselves “sexual mystics.”

Mamleyev’s works could only be sold in Russia through Samizdat and in the 1980s began to appear in the West. In 1974, Mamleyev emigrated to the U.S., and later lived in Paris. He returned to Russia in 1993 and, today, alternates between Moscow and Paris. Younger Moscow writers such as Vladimir Sorokin or Victor Yerofeyev venerate him as “the heir to both Gogol and Dostoyevsky.”

In 2000, Mamleyev was awarded the Pushkin Prize by the Alfred Toepfe Foundation and the International PEN Club, and he was a scholar at the German Foundation, Preußische Seehandlung.

Mamleyev is considered the “most Russian” writer in Russia today. He founded a new literary current called “metaphysical realism.” Vladimir Spakov wrote of Mamleyev in The Petersburg Book Journal:

“His prose is devoid of actual events… but it holds something else instead: an eternal thing that has forever been part of man, but which nobody likes to be confronted with. The mirror he holds up to us has turned black, reflecting our dark side. To do so, it needed a writer capable of standing at the abyss without falling and of telling the more frightful among us who pretend to be ‘civilized': There are monsters hiding in you!”

Mamleyev’s heroes are often characterized as “idiots”, “feeble-minded”, or “dopes” – but in fact they are all in love with being and dream of immortality. They want to understand the incomprehensible, and find answers to questions beyond the realm of human reason. They have entered a prohibited area. While Mamleyev’s figures seem to emerge from a grotesque and evil fairy tale, he places them into a realistic context. And that is why his prose is both unbelievably credible and merciless.

From: http://www.hauteculturebooks.com/yuri...