Dionysius's Board

USSR, early 1970s. An old, former provincial town several hundred kilometers from Moscow. Art history candidate Anna, who recently defended her dissertation on the works of icon painter Dionysius, learns that a sixteenth-century icon has disappeared from a nearby monastery. Anna sets off in the footsteps of the missing image of the Savior, not realizing that these are traces of blood. In the 1960s, Alexey Smirnov von Rauch (1937-2009) made an indelible impression on the regulars of the Yuzhinsky circle with his prose, and on connoisseurs of modernism in the Czech Republic and Germany with his painting. Having severed ties with the outside world, Smirnov spent thirty years within the walls of churches and monasteries, restoring frescoes and observing the parallel life of Soviet society, where the surviving descendants of nobles, runaway monks, enterprising foreign tourists, declassed elements and the ubiquitous KGB officers were intertwined in a stifling struggle. The gripping, truthful and therefore even more cruel novel "The Board of Dionysius" was written in 1976 and put on the drawer with no prospect of publication. A lost masterpiece of Russian literature, it convincingly shows that the central questions of life in Rus' have not changed in fifty years, or in five hundred.