Prezentation of New Books for Children: Trans-Siberian & The Apartment

Samokat publishing house invites to join the presentation of new books by Alexandra Litvina and Anna Desnitskaya.

Trans-Siberian. All aboard came out at the end of 2019, and sold 10,000 Russian-language copies in its first two months. There are conversations happening with many foreign publishing houses about translating the book into foreign languages. JRC Russian Railways have become a general partner of the book.

The transsiberian railway is the longest railroad in the world. It begins in Moscow, and the final stop — Vladivostok — comes 9288.2 kilometres later. Between those two points come megalopolises and smaller cities, villages and towns, taiga, mountains, the Baikal, the steppe, and great rivers. The Trans-Siberian is like a thread that links all these distant points, their histories and their people.

Over the course of this book’s creation, residents took part from many of the cities and towns, where — be it for a couple of minutes or half an hour — the Moscow-Vladivostok train stops.

The Apartment has won several international and overseas prizes, and over 67,000 copies of the book have been printed worldwide. The first edition was published in Russia in 2017. Since then, the book has been released in Germany, France, and the USA, and editions are being prepared by Chinese, Polish, Arabic, and Romanian publishers, with conversations taking place about translations into other languages too.

Within the story of the inhabitants of an old Moscow flat, one can find a reflection of Russian history throughout the 20th century. This history is told not just by the people, but their things: furniture and clothing, dishes and books, games and household items. After all, these items carry with them imprints of their time, they store the memories and traces of the ages in which they were made and used.

The materials for the book were gathered over a year and a half, with hundreds of people interviewed to talk about their daily life, the fates of members of their family, and the things they left behind. Rare photos and information about the details of people’s lives and different periods of time were collected from museums and archives, both public and private.

The event is free.