Anna-Nina Kovalenko

Five Steps to Resurrection Anna-Nina Kovalenko

Main themes: love, woman as its object and its source, emigration as a cultural experience, the philosophy of spiritual ascent, compassion for the animals, for the world. (One of main characters of the novel is Stacey, the cat adapted by heroine who then perished, but she came in critical time to save it.) Genesis and memorable events of the second half of the twentieth century, beginning of the twenty-first. Brief annotation: to an extent, Five Steps to Resurrection can be considered an alternative to Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marques, in which a man and a woman, destined for each other, finally unite in advanced age. The narration, done in the voice of the female protagonist, maintains an ironic and skeptical distance, offering a bitter smile at times. In contrast to Marques, the author of Five Steps focuses not on physiological details but rather on visual descriptions (whether aesthetical or anti-aesthetical) as well as on subconscious processes. This novel, as the author's earlier novel White Horse, is written in a wreath form: each chapter begins with the last line of the preceding chapter, and the conclusion goes back to the foreword. The author's interest in the philosophical teaching Everest, and the work of its spiritual leader, D. Arundel, is apparent.