disUNITY brings together two novels of Russian magic realism by Anatoly Kudryavitsky, the bilingual poet and novelist whom Joseph Brodsky once called a poet who voices the unspoken. Born in Moscow to a Polish father and a half-Irish mother, and long resident in Dublin, Kudryavitsky writes fiction that one reviewer described as Russian magic realism laced with Kafkaesque terror, Philip K. Dick science fiction and a touch of the Celtic Twilight.
In the first novel, Shadowplay on a Sunless Day, the reader moves from a violent, corrupt Moscow to the transient world of émigrés and refugees in Germany, and then into the otherworld of the Tuatha Dé Danann of Celtic myth. It is a layered mosaic of the real and the surreal, turning on questions of self-identification, national identity and the crises of a generation of new Europeans.
The second novel, A Parade of Mirrors and Reflections, turns to human cloning: secret experiments in a laboratory outside Moscow, and the clones who awaken to their own identity in the crossroads city of Grodno, in Belarus. Together the two works form a meditation on exile, selfhood and the arbitrary desire of societies to improve themselves through selection and exclusion. Launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair, disUNITY is a singular work of contemporary Russian literature in translation.
Author
Born in Moscow, Anatoly Kudryavitsky is the grandson of an Irishman who was imprisoned in Stalin’s GULAG. Educated at the Moscow Medical Academy, he holds a PhD in Biomedical Science. In Russia, he worked as a researcher, as a magazine editor, and as a literary translator. Blacklisted in the Soviet Union until 1988, he was first published openly in 1989.
Since then, he has authored three novels, The Case-Book of Inspector Mylls (Zakharov Books, Moscow, 2008), The Flying Dutchman (Text Publishers, Moscow, 2013) and Shadowplay on a Sunless Day (Text Publishers, Moscow, 2014), as well as a book of his novellas and short stories, A Parade of Mirror and Reflections (Text Publishers, Moscow, 2017). He has also published seven collections of his poetry in Russian and three collections of his English-language poems, the latest being Horizon (Red Moon Press, 2016). He edited A Night in the Nabokov Hotel (Dedalus Press, 2006), an anthology of contemporary Russian poetry in his translations into English, and Coloured Handprints (Dedalus Press, 2015), an anthology of contemporary German-language poetry in his translations into English. He has also translated English-language classics into Russian and Polish and Swedish poetry into English.
Kudryavitsky has won many international awards for his English-language haiku, and is regarded as one of the most prominent European haiku poets. He lives in Co. Dublin, Ireland, and works as the editor of SurVision, an international magazine for Neo-Surrealist poetry, and Shamrock, an international haiku magazine. He has given readings and spoken at many European literary festivals. His poems and stories have been translated into fourteen languages.
