Последние издания книг Брюса Чатвина

Волга — с одной стороны, метафора концентрированной «русской жизни», с другой, двухнедельный гедонистический вояж — уже несколько веков привлекает к себе внимание иностранцев, желающих познать Россию, но при этом не испытывать себя на прочность путешествием по Транссибу. В сборник «Вниз по Волге» вошли три репортажа зарубежных специалистов, побывавших на Волге в советские годы. Вместе они представляют не только интересный взгляд на СССР изнутри «витрины великого эксперимента», но и фиксируют в моменте состояния городов, спускающихся по Волге к Югу России, отмечая их локальные особенности, возникающие на пересечении вертикали реки и горизонтальных контекстов страны.

Фотографии взяты из частной коллекции галереи «Аврора-1991».

Книга выпущена издательством Ad Marginem и Центром современной культуры «Смена» при содействии Государственного историко-архитектурного и художественного музея-заповедника «Остров-град Свияжск».

Bruce Chatwin's bestselling novel traces the fortunes of the enigmatic and unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz. Despite the restrictions of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Utz asserts his individuality through his devotion to his precious collection of Meissen porcelain. Although Utz is permitted to leave the country each year, and considers defecting each time, he is not allowed to take his porcelain with him and so he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner both of the Communist state and of his collection.

Beautifully written and full of wonderful descriptions and intriguing tales, In Patagonia is an account of Bruce Chatwin's travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and his encounters with the people whose fascinating stories delay him on the road.

Брюс Чатвин (1940-1989) — британский писатель, работавший в разное время экспертом по импрессионизму в аукционном доме «Сотбис» и консультантом по вопросам искусства и архитектуры в газете Sunday Times. В настоящее издание вошли его тексты, так или иначе связанные с искусством: роман о коллекционере мейсенского фарфора «Утц», предисловия к альбомам, статьи и эссе разных лет. В своих текстах Чатвин, утонченный стилист и блистательный рассказчик, описывает мир коллекционеров и ценителей искусства как особую атмосферу, с другой оптикой и интимными отношениями между произведением и его владельцем или наблюдателем. И сам выступает как коллекционер занимательных фактов, интересных собеседников и забытых имен.

Bruce Chatwin is one of the most significant British novelists and travel writers of our time. His books have become modern-day classics which defy categorisation, inspired by and reflecting his incredible journeys. Tragically, Chatwin's compelling narrative voice was cut off just as he had found it. 'Bruce had just begun' said his friend, Salman Rushdie, 'we saw only the first act'.

But Chatwin left behind a wealth of letters and postcards that he wrote, from his first week at school until shortly before his death at the age of forty-eight. Whether typed on Sotheby's notepaper or hastily scribbled, Chatwin's correspondence reveals more about himself than he was prepared to expose in his books; his health and finances, his literary ambitions and tastes, his uneasiness about his sexual orientation; above all, his lifelong quest for where to live. Comprising material collected over two decades from hundreds of contacts across five continents, Chatwin's letters are a valuable and illuminating record of one of the greatest and most enigmatic writers of the twentieth century.

Брюс Чатвин - британский писатель, работавший в разное время экспертом по импрессионизму в аукционном доме "Сотбис" и консультантом по вопросам искусства и архитектуры в газете "Санди Таймс". В настоящее издание вошли его тексты, так или иначе связанные с искусством: роман о коллекционере мейсенского фарфора "Утц", предисловия к альбомам, статьи и эссе разных лет. В своих текстах Чатвин, утонченный стилист и блистательный рассказчик, описывает мир коллекционеров и ценителей искусства как особую атмосферу, с другой оптикой и интимными отношениями между произведением и его владельцем или наблюдателем. И сам выступает как коллекционер…

Lewis and Benjamin Jones, identical twins, were born with the century on a farm on the English-Welsh border. For eighty years they live on the farm—sharing the same clothes, tilling the same soil, sleeping in the same bed. Their lives and the lives of their neighbors—farmers, drovers, clergymen, traders, coffin-makers—are only obliquely touched by the chaos of twentieth-century progress. Nonetheless, the twins’ world—a few square miles of Welsh countryside—is rich in the oddities, the wonders, and the tragedies of the human experience. In this extraordinary novel Bruce Chatwin has captured every nuance of the Welsh landscape and of the lives and souls of the people who lived there.

The songlines are the invisible pathways that criss-cross Australia, ancient tracks connecting communities and following ancient boundaries. Along these lines Aboriginals passed the songs which revealed the creation of the land and the secrets of its past. In this magical account, Chatwin recalls his travels across the length and breadth of Australia seeking to find the truth about the songs and unravel the mysteries of their stories.

Fascinated by Patagonia ever since an early childhood lust for his Grandma's scrap of hairy Giant Sloth skin, Bruce Chatwin is intrigued by odd miners, Darwin, the Welsh and the log cabin built by Butch Cassidy. From Rio Negro to the southernmost town of Ushuaia, Chatwin depicts all in writing as spare as the Patagonian desert and as vibrant as the purple clouds off Last Hope Sound.

Ранее прославившийся своим эссеистическим трэвелогом-исследованием "В Патагонии", в "Тропах песен" Брюс Чатвин предпринимает путешествие внутрь еще одной мистерии, но уже на другом конце земли - во внутренней Австралии аборигенов.

Ранее прославившийся своим эссеистическим трэвелогом-исследованием "В Патагонии", в "Тропах песен" Брюс Чатвин предпринимает путешествие внутрь еще одной мистерии, но уже на другом конце земли - во внутренней Австралии аборигенов.

Ранее прославившийся своим эссеистическим трэвелогом-исследованием "В Патагонии", в "Тропах песен" Брюс Чатвин предпринимает путешествие внутрь еще одной мистерии, но уже на другом конце земли - во внутренней Австралии аборигенов.

"В Патагонии" - первая книга Чатвина, которая принесла начинающему писателю широкую известность и несколько литературных премий. Каждая маленькая глава этой книги могла бы стать целым романом. Это необычные истории жизни обычных людей, описания далеких городов, таинственных лесов и невиданных животных. Чатвин идет пешком, едет на попутных грузовиках, плывет на пароходе и пишет обо всем, что встречает в пути. Острый взгляд неутомимого путешественника позволяет ему описывать такие вещи, которых никто другой не замечал.

In this collection of profiles, essays and travel stories, Chatwin takes us to Benin, where he is arrested as a mercenary during a coup; to Boston to meet an LSD guru who believes he is Christ; to India with Indira Ghandi when she attempted a political comeback in 1978; and to Nepal where he reminds us that "Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot".

An elegantly written tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis and their interactions with their small local community, Chatwin comments movingly on the larger questions of human experience.

What Am I Doing Here is a collection of journalism and new pieces assembled on Chatwin's deathbed. Reviews, articles, memories. It is hard to find a weak piece or bad sentence. The worst you can say about his carved, icy prose is that it occasionally crosses into archness or effect for its own sake. But you don't have to say that often.

Chatwin's review of Ernst Jünger's wartime diaries (see here for my look at 'The Devil's Captain: Ernst Jünger in Nazi Paris, 1941-1944') is still the best English language introduction to this controversial German writer. Chatwin, firmly on the left, liked the work rather than the man or his politics. Here's his summary of Jünger's 'On the Marble Cliffs':

[It] is an allegorical tale, written in a frozen, humourless, yet brilliantly coloured style that owes something to the nineteenth-century Decadents and something to the Scandinavian sagas. The result is a prose equivalent of an art nouveau object in glass.

Nicely put. Chatwin wrote three novels himself ('The Viceroy of Ouidah' from 1980, 'On the Black Hill' from 1982, and 1988's 'Utz'), along with 1977 travel book 'In Patagonia', and 'The Songlines' from 1987, a half-fictionalised account of Aboriginal Australian culture. All are worth picking up. 'Utz' is the neatest; 'On the Black Hill' the best; 'The Viceroy of Ouidah' a failed attempt to update Flaubert; 'In Patagonia' the starkest travelbook ever written; and 'The Songlines' alternately excellent and lazy. No-one ever regrets reading Chatwin's crystalline, detached prose.

Chatwin's fifth book, a constantly shifting portrait of Kaspar Utz, resident of 1970s Prague, who should be fleeing the authorities.

He refuses to move on, however, trapped by his love for a legendary porcelein collection, now housed in his two-bedroom flat.

This is a perfect copy of Chatwin's most famous book, brilliantly discussing the enormous questions of how mankind can achieve happiness in a post-industrial world.

From many sources, including the Australian Aborigines, he suggests, "it is solved by walking".