My Century, My Beast: Memories
29.99 €
In stock
My Century, My Beast: Memories
29.99 €
In memoirs that balance between memoir and fiction, novelist, poet, and translator Irina Efimovna Kunina (1900–2003) sums up her extraordinary life. In the 1910s, she studied at the Higher Women's Raevsky Courses, joined St. Petersburg literary circles, and associated with Alexander Blok, Nikolai Gumilev, and Osip Mandelstam. Then came a move to Kyiv, where she met local and visiting literary figures, a flight to Odessa, participation in the White Army's Bredovo campaign, marriage to a White Guard colonel, a Polish internment camp for White Army units, escape from it, Constantinople, and, finally, Zagreb, where she broke up with her husband. In 1924, she returned to Russia, where she wrote newspaper reviews, song lyrics, and screenplays, appeared in several films, and became friends with Mikhail Zoshchenko. However, after traveling abroad in 1926, Kunina did not return and married the Croatian lawyer Bozidar Aleksander, who later became a prominent Yugoslav diplomat. She lived with him for half a century. During this period, she associated with many diplomats and writers, including Yevgeny Zamyatin and Sergei Zweig. Kunina's memoirs are a rare testimony of someone who survived all the cataclysms of the 20th century (three Russian revolutions, the First World War, the Civil War, and the Second World War) and managed to adapt to a wide variety of cultural traditions.
See also:
- All books by the publisher
- All books by the author
- All books in the series Russia in memoirs