First and foremost, our thanks to Julia Meitov Hersey, who translated the novel simply because she loved it. We would like to thank everyone who assisted with the English language publication of VITA NOSTRA.

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I am so grateful to them for giving me another chance to relive those experiences with all the means of cinematography at my disposal, I will do my best to convey the magic of those times.” “VITA NOSTRA is a fantasy, but a fantasy so authentic that, having turned its last page, I thought that Marina and Sergey Dyachenko somehow know everything that happened to me during the first year of my adult life. “The interest in a human being, in the depths of his soul is the main theme of any work by the Dyachenkos.” It is a world in which the victors are judged.” In the era of aggressive militant immorality, Marina and Sergey dared to place their money on the world created by them, the world that is fundamentally ethical. “One thing is clear - Marina and Sergey Dyachenko are avidly read by both the intellectuals and those who never read. Lev Grossman, a novelist, a senior writer and a book critic, TIME magazine. It deserves a global audience in English, and I believe that Hersey’s translation is the way to get it.” It’s a book that has the potential to become a modern classic of its genre. I’ve studied and reread Hersey’s translation, and through it VITA NOSTRA has become a powerful influence on my own writing. It has that marvelous clarity you see from translators who are accomplished writers in their own right - it never calls attention to itself, it always gets out of the way of the original work, but it also has an enormous integrity of its own, born of a precise understanding of Russian and English and of the deeper, international language of storytelling itself. “I was stunned by what I read - not just by the story, which was a revelation to me in itself, but also by the vividness and fluency and power of Hersey’s translation.

Vita nostra marina and sergey dyachenko