How it was made
A finished book looks like a decision made once. In fact it stands on auditions, remakes, other people’s hands and agreements. Gathered here is what usually stays out of sight: how the voice was chosen, how the sound was built, and four stories about how the covers came about.
Sound
Who narrated the books
- «37 Selected Poems of the Poet», female version
- Sofia Ivashkina · Lilia Vlasova · Maria Lutovinova · Tatyana Shendrik
- «The Adventures of Kesha the Russian Boy» (English edition) and «My Favourite Poems in English»
- Carl Munson, native speaker
- «Children's Wisdom»
- Anfisa Voskresenskaya, the author's daughter · Pyotr Svetlichny
- Sound engineering of the audiobooks
- Pyotr Svetlichny
Fifty voices for one book
Around fifty voice artists auditioned for the female version of «37 Selected Poems of the Poet». The selection was long and exacting: a voice for poetry is chosen not for the beauty of its timbre but for what it does with a pause. Four voices are heard in the book — Sofia Ivashkina, Liliya Vlasova, Maria Lutovinova and Tatyana Shendrik — and more than forty others stand behind them.
Four rooms inside one voice
Sound engineer Pyotr Svetlichny. Usually a voice is simply placed in a room with a single reverb, and that is that. Here one vocal track carried more than fifty effects across its different sections and up to four reverbs at once, each with its own purpose. Engineers tend to avoid such combinations: they turn to mud easily. Here that was precisely the task — the poem sounds not in a room but in several spaces at once.
Russian surnames in an English voice
The English version of «The Adventures of Kesha the Russian Boy» and the collection «My Favourite Poems in English» were read by Carl Munson, a native speaker. The Russian surnames came out so far off that they had to be redone: written transcriptions were not enough. Every name was recorded as a voice sample, sent over and listened to again until the sound matched. Getting a foreign surname right is a separate job — one you only notice when it has not been done.
A ten-year-old narrator
«Children's Wisdom» is a collection of the sayings my daughter, Anfisa Voskresenskaya, came out with between the ages of two and ten. In the audiobook they are spoken in her own voice: at ten she worked as a narrator in a home studio and recorded her own lines herself, take after take. The result is a rare thing: a person reading aloud her younger self. The second voice in the book is Pyotr Svetlichny.
A premiere on Portuguese radio
The English version of «Kesha» was presented not on Russian platforms but on the air of Good Morning Portugal — with Carl Munson, the very man who had narrated the book. An English book by a Russian author reached its listener through a Portuguese radio station, in the voice of its own narrator: a route no one plans in advance.
Covers: four stories
A cover looks like a finished picture. In practice it is a separate job, with a client, a contractor, and the right to reject.
Flowers that turned into colours
The author asked the artist for many small flowers on the cover, meaning the plants. The artist, based in Latvia, understood the Russian word as «colours» and added shades instead. In Russian the two words share a form, and only context tells them apart — context he did not have.
One picture, four pairs of hands
The black-and-white drawing was given to four different artists to colour. Each produced their own version, and the results were assembled into a puzzle. The picture comes together, yet the fragments are visibly different — not a flaw of the assembly, but its point.
Ordered again from scratch
The colour work had to be commissioned a second time. Several books have more than one cover, simply because the first version did not satisfy the author.
Made by his own hand
The one case where the author designed the covers himself. It took a long time; the Cyrillic lettering of the title was commissioned separately as a logo, and both designs were put together by him. For the other books he describes his role as the author of the idea.