The fifth volume of the bie bao series presents Ilya Zdanevich’s fictional auto-biographical writings based on his one-year stay in Istanbul in 1921. It contains the three final chapters of PhiloSophia, a massive novel he wrote in 1930, depicting an obscure revolutionary plot evolving around Hagia Sophia. This volume also presents the first two chapters of Zdanevich’s 1929 epistolary novel Letters to Morgan Philips Price.
Both PhiloSophia and the Letters are translated and edited by Thomas J. Kitson who has described his writing mood in these Istanbul writings as “pro-Soviet melancholy.” Illustrated with Zdanevich’s sketches of Hagia Sophia and other Byzantine churches, the volume concludes with a dizzying text by Odesa-born artist Nikolay Karabinovych, remixing PhiloSophia tailored to the “new architecture of collective security” of today’s wars and empires. Inspired by Zdanevich’s paradoxical graphomania, Karabinovych’s intervention undoes the centuries-long imperial narrative. -Publisher
