The Mystery of Conscience

by Fazil Iskander, Sophia Manukova

This book introduces a collection of Fazil Iskander’s poetry in English. This selection of 70 poems of the master of Russian and Abkhazian Literature Fazil Iskander,nominated for the Nobel Prize, presents the poetry that is wise and beautiful in its philosophy. It embraces poems by Fazil Iskander,written by him during the span of time bridging the twentieth and twenty first century, from 1953 to 2013. They organically intertwine the intricate layers of people's lives, their intriguing fates, interconnectedness and cultural phenomena. In his poems, there is always an inner subtext behind the exterior subject.This book of poetic translations also contains an article on the art of Fazil Iskander by a historian Roman Gosin, and an essay on Fazil Iskander's poetry, written by a linguist Sophia Manukova, who made this first publication possible by selecting and translating his poetry. Sophia Manukova is a professor of English at the City College of San Francisco, California.

150 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2015

About the author

Fazil Abdulovich Iskander, also known in Russian as Фазиль Искандер, arguably the most famous Abkhaz writer, renowned in the former Soviet Union for his vivid descriptions, mostly written in Russian, of Caucasian life. He has written various stories, most famously "Zashita Chika", which star a crafty and likable young boy named "Chik".

The most famous intellectual of Abkhazia, he distanced himself from the Abkhaz secessionist strivings in the late 1980s and criticised both Georgian and Abkhaz communities of Abkhazia for their ethnic prejudices. He warned that Abkhazia could become a new Nagorno-Karabakh.

He was probably best known in the English speaking world for Sandro of Chegem, a picaresque novel that recounts life in a fictional Abkhaz village from the early years of the 20th century until the 1970s, which evoked praise for the author as "an Abkhazian Mark Twain." Mr. Iskander's humor, like Mark Twain's, has a tendency to sneak up on you instead of hitting you over the head. This rambling, amusing and ironic work has been considered as an example of magic realism, although Iskander himself said he "did not care for Latin American magic realism in general". A section of the novel dealing with Sandro's encounter with Joseph Stalin was made into the Russian film Baltazar's Feasts, or a Night with Stalin in 1989.

Iskander lived in Moscow and was a writer for the newspaper Kultura.