On July 2, Oleksandr Korotko published an exerpt from his new novel called “Mark” on author’s personal Facebook page.
We publish the text of the exerpt below.
It was well past midnight. Mark was walking up and down the lonely streets of Karlovy Vary. He was disappearing into the luxury of a summer surrounded by the villas of past centuries. The slopes of the mountains loomed over him, on which fat herds of forests grazed. Delight led him through places familiar to his heart. It seemed to him that it was not he,but the city was dreaming.
Every time Mark came to Karlovy Vary incredible things happened to him, and like a seashell on the seabed, he grew a memory of colours and sounds devoid of reality.
In this reserved land he unwittingly shunned the plebeian origins of hours and minutes, and on the non-existent terrain of premonitions his imagination drew geometric figures from the privacy of fleeting visions. His world of hallucinations took on real contours and features, the irrational became rational, and his spiritual vision scrutinised the details of as yet unlived events.
And yet his troubled nature was not to be completely dissolved in this unique archaic beauty. There were good reasons and circumstances for that. First of all, Mark was haunted by the painful memories of their last encounter with Gary. He drove them away from him like pesky flies, but memory with its nerve endings, now and then unceremoniously invaded his mind, turned everything upside down, and like a demon burst out, became his shadow, followed him, then soared into the sky, and immediately returned to earth, and took him to Baden-Baden on Goethe Platz.