About the Author

Dina Rubina was born in 1953 in the family of an artist and a history teacher in Tashkent (Uzbekistan). Both her parents were Ukrainian Jews, each of them got to Tashkent in their own way -- mother with the waves of refugees from Poltava, father came back after the Second World War to his parents who were evacuated from Char'kov. Both families preserved rather artistic family legends about their ancestors. Her great-grandfather on the mother's side was a rabbi, great-grandfather on the father's side was a drayman in Warsaw, a man of such unbridled temper that Rubina's grandfather had to run away from home and never came back to his family.The writer's childhood was filled with family love and lack of space -- small apartments with not too much living space for a young girl. One room was always her father's studio with Dina's folding bed stuck among the canvases and paint tubes. "One of the nightmares of my childhood: in the middle of a night I touch, with my leg or arm, the latest portrait of Karl Marx ordered to my father by the next kolchoz and it falls down on me", -- many years later Rubina described that Soviet "comfort" in the novella Camera naezzhaet! (1995; translated as The Camera Zooms In!). The tightness both physical and social, the tightness of circumstances -- could it be the source of a constant, present already in Rubina's first stories, motif of an escape to freedom, the yearning for unbound space and absolute independence -- from social to metaphysical?..The first story Bespokoynaia Natura (1971; translated as Fidgety Nature) by Dina Rubina was published in the national magazine Yunost (circulation 3 million), in the humor department Green Case. Very soon Rubina began to write for the more serious prose department of Yunost, and the "fidgety natures" -- characters of the early Rubina's stories -- Po Subbotam (1974; translated as On Saturdays), Etot Chudnoy Altukhov (1976; translated as This Strange Altukhov), etc. -- came to the readers. In 1977 Rubina created an amazing in its lyrical intonation novella Kogda Ge Poydet Sneg? (1980; translated as So, When Will It Snow?). It tells the story of a growing-up of a teenager. Nina, the main character of the novel, is gravely ill but the lucid, warm feeling of the first love helps her to conquer the fear of non-existence. Rubina's very first novellas already showed examples of delicate psychological prose.In 1977, after graduating from the Tashkent Conservatory, Rubina began to work in the Institute of Culture. Her students were "the children of mountain shepherds" who had to grasp the European culture and bring it to the rural Asian auls of Uzbekistan. The writer recalls the pedagogical experience: "What exactly does a culture mean? And would we interbreed a shepherd's song... with a Schubert's serenade? Would it be better for the world culture... if the shepherd's song would live separate

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