
The Two Richards
Vladimir Azarov(Author)
Exile Editions (Publisher)
Published on 30. November 2021
Book
Paperback/Softback
120 pages
978-1-55096-945-0 (ISBN)
Description
"A fictional memoir in poetic form about the story of a little boy, his kinship to a long-dead king, and the spiritual moment of a man in his golden years. Vladimir Azarov was a child of the Soviet Kazakhstan steppes. When his mother discovered that he had a slight curvature of the spine, with her own loving humor she nicknamed him Richie, after Richard III, the 14th-century English king, himself crooked, made famous as a monster by Shakespeare. At the same time, Azarov suffered a vision-altering wound to his eye that transformed the way he perceived the world, both real and imagined. The wound eventually healed and, as he grew up feeling a wry kinship to the king, his bent eye became that of a visionary, of an artist who was a convention-breaking architect, and finally as a poet, not writing in Russian, but in the King's English. When, not long ago, the actual bones of Richard III were found under a parking lot in Leicester town, Azarov - now in his 80s living in Toronto, and remembering his kinship by name - envisioned the archeological dig and re-interment of the bones, and he became one in his mind with the reputation-renovated and redeemed king. He became, at last, Richie-Richard III, being sung to on a rainy day, over a new grave, by medieval knights."--
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Toronto, ON
Canada
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 126 mm
Width: 192 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
118 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-55096-945-0 (9781550969450)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Vladimir Azarov is an architect and poet, formerly from Moscow, who lives in Toronto. He has published: On the Death of Ivan Ilyich; Three Books; Of Architecture (with illustrations by Nina Bunjevac); Seven Lives; Sochi Delerium; Broken Pastries; Mongolian Études; Night Out; Dinner With Catherine the Great; Imitation; Of Life and Other Small Sacrifices; The Kiss from Mary Pickford: Cinematic Poems; and Voices in Dialogue: Dramatic Poems - and with Barry Callaghan, Strong Words, translations in an English/Russian bilingual edition, of Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, and Andrei Voznesensky.