Radin

Lena Eltang's characters are always a bit homeless. A place to live, a sense of homeliness, is replaced by world culture. You could say that they embody with paradoxical literalness Mandelstam's formula that Hellenism is a furnace pot. This is how critic Igor Gulin described one of the author's texts. Eltang's new book continues the tradition: it is not only a classic novel about a Russian writer caught in a dangerous story in a foreign land, and not only a detective drama, in which there is crime and punishment. Above all, it is the travel notes of an escapist, a lost European, a man of common sense but full of folly, it is the diary of a romantic, immersing us in the space of the hero's consciousness, living simultaneously in two dimensions: in the subjectively perceived social reality and in the space of a personal myth.