Nikolai Grozni,ÐÐ¸ÐºÐ¾Ð»Ð°Ð¹ Ð“Ñ€Ð¾Ð·Ð´Ð¸Ð½ÑÐºÐ¸
Life in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the late 1980s is bleak and controlled., The oppressive Communist regime bears down on all aspects of peopleâ€™s lives much like the granite sky overhead. In the crumbling old building that hosts the Sofia Music School for the Gifted, inflexible and unsentimental apparatchiks drill the students like soldiersâ€”as if the music they are teaching did not have the power to set these young souls on fire. ,Fifteen-year-old Konstantin is a brash, brilliant pianist of exceptional sensitivity, struggling toward adulthood in a society where honest expression often comes at a terrible cost. Confined to the Music School for most of each day and a good part of the night, Konstantin exults in his small rebellionsâ€”smoking, drinking, and mocking Party pomp and cant at every opportunity. Intelligent and arrogant, funny and despairing, compassionate and cruel, he is driven simultaneously by a desire to be the best and an almost irresistible urge to fail. His isolation, buttressed by the grim conventions of a loveless society, prevents him from getting close to the mercurial violin virtuoso Irina, but also from understanding himself. ,Through it all, Konstantin plays the piano with inflamed passion: he is transported by unparalleled explorations of Chopin, Debussy, and Bach, even as he is cursed by his teachersâ€™ numbing efforts at mind control. Each challenging piano piece takes on a life of its own, engendering exquisite new revelations. A refuge from a reality Konstantin detests, the piano is also what tethers him to it. Yet if he can only truly master this grandest of instrumentsâ€”as well as his own self-destructive urgesâ€”it might just secure his passage out of this broken country. ,Nikolai Grozniâ€”himself a native of Bulgaria and a world-class pianist in his youthâ€”sets this electrifying portrait of adolescent longing and anxiety against a backdrop of tumultuous, historic world events. Hypnotic and headlong, ,Wunderkind ,gives us a stunningly urgent, acutely observed, and wonderfully tragicomic glimpse behind the Iron Curtain at the very end of the Cold War, reminding us of the sometimes life-saving grace of great music.
Fiction,Music,Cultural,Bulgaria,European Literature,Bulgarian Literature,Historical,Historical Fiction,Literary Fiction,Unfinished
Wunderkind