Letters to Another Room

Reviews / Votes

'Ravil Bukharaev carries the flame of the finest Russian prose - of Pushkin, Turgenev, Bunin. His classical clarity, his perfect balance of phrase and thought and the unhurried and magnanimous flow of his narration are wonderfully rendered from Russian by John Farndon's English translation. Letters to Another Room is an everlasting dialogue between the author and his characters, between the writer and his readers, between the narrator and his translator - a broad and true dialogue that bridges cultures and epochs.'


HAMID ISMAILOV Author of The Railway and A Poet and Bin-Laden '...This writing [by Ravil Bukharaev] is at the limits of the Russian language as it was with Nabokov and Brodsky; it is constant listening, constant awareness a la Proust of the self, continuous attention towards every infinitesimal facet of Life; relentless chasing of the soul, perpetual astonishment of the fact that one exists, that the world is created for you - you only have to understand it and fall in love with it, and it will reveal itself. And every word runs and hurries, hastens - as if it is a kind of music, or a kind of Arachna's web... It seems to be already a form of writing beyond Speech, some precious Islamic pattern, a dazzling calligraphy, an ornament circumventing the entire world...'


VALENTIN KURBATOV Literary critic and Secretary of the Board of the Russian Union of Writers