Maxima Library

Leonid Latynin was born in 1938 in a small town on the Volga. In the private library of an Orthodox priest he discovered the pre-revolutionary Russian culture such as the poetry of Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Bely and Blok, the art of Bakst, Dobuzhinsky and Vrubel, which was in total contrast with the castrated literature taught at school. «The Silver Age» art became for him a symbol of opposition to the impoverished and colorless provincial life of the Stalin period.

After a series of manual jobs and the army service he graduated from Moscow University upon which he worked in various publishing houses while writing poetry and studying pre-Christian Russian culture.

He published six collections of his verse, but he only managed to publish his novels after perestroika:

The Face-Maker and theMuse in 1988; Sleeper at Harvest Time in 1993, and Stavrand Sara in 1994. Sleeper at Harvest Time was published in French translation by Flammarion in 1992, and in English translation by Zephyr Press in 1994.

«Latynin's apocalyptic novel has been published just at a time when his grim predictions are coming true…» — Le Monde.

«Latynin is a convincing and disquieting ethnographer but he is also a born storyteller, perfectly at home in this fragmented age… His incantations possess a magic power…» — Magazinelitteraire (Paris).

The heart-stopping final chapter of the Night Watch pentalogy.

Walking the streets of our cities are the Others. These men and women are guardians of the Twilight, a shadowy parallel world that exists alongside our own. Each has sworn allegiance to one side, fighting for the Light, or the Darkness. But now, beyond the continuing struggle comes a peril that threatens their very world…

At Moscow airport, Higher Light Magician Anton Gorodetsky overhears a child screaming that a plane is about to crash. He discovers that the child is a prophet: an Other with the gift of foretelling the future. When the catastrophe is averted, Gorodetsky senses a disruption in the natural order, one that is confirmed by the arrival of a dark and terrifying predator.

From the Night Watch headquarters Gorodetsky travels to London, to Taiwan and across Russia in search of clues, unearthing as he goes a series of increasingly cataclysmic prophecies. He soon realises that what is at stake is the existence of the Twilight itself – and that only he will be able to save it.

The women's movement and women's literature are relatively new phenomena in Russian cultural life. Before perestroika there was only one organization for women, and that was the government-controlled Soviet Women's Committee. In the last few years sixty-two have been registered, six newspapers for women are now published, there is a TV programme called "Career Woman", and we have four feminist organizations. In devoting this issue to women's writing we are not proposing a rigid approach to Russian literature on the basis of gender, just as age or race strike us as only marginally relevant. It just so happened that in our search for new and interesting works of literature we have found an abundance of excellent stories by women writers. Some of these we are offering here for your attention as representative of woman's view of the world, and her present search for identity. To a large extent Russia's women are bearing the brunt of the present upheavals in our society.