Catechon

Sukhbat Afaltoni is a prose writer, poet, translator; author of the novels "Great Fish", "Earthly Paradise", "Tashkent Novel", "The Worship of the Magi"; laureate of the "Russian Prize", finalist of the "Big Book", "Clear Glade", "Russian Booker". "Catechon" is a... philosophically complex novel and at the same time a love story of "two incompatible people". He is Burned, or Farhad, a guide from Samarkand, she is Anna, a translator from Erfurt. Since his youth, Burned has been obsessed with the idea of finding the Catechon — that which will halt the flow of time and delay the end of the world. But what is the Catechon? A state? A special garden? An artificial volcano? .. Or perhaps Farhad himself? The setting is Erfurt, Samarkand and Tashkent, Fulda and Naumburg. A mixing of times, layering of epochs, today's days and the confrontation of two heroes... "He began to forget her. He called her by other names. Once, in Batumi, he even asked her to leave. But worst of all was that she herself began to forget him. No, she remembered everything connected with him. His scent, passport number, some of his thoughts... She did not remember one thing: why he should be next to her. What happened in Samarkand, why he not only ended up next to her, but flowed into her with noise, like Siab into the Black Sea. Although where is Siab, and where is her sea..."