Alexander Grin’s Scarlet Sails is not only a story about love and dreams but also a coded book, full of symbols. Every name, every place, even the color of the sails carries a hidden meaning. Grin seemed to leave us a message: a dream becomes reality when we ourselves create a miracle. The first trial public literary readings dedicated to the 145th anniversary of Alexander Grin’s birth took place at the Literary Salon and the Children’s Club. Four brave women—our regular readers, members of the literary salon, mothers and one grandmother—took the stage and read excerpts from Scarlet Sails. Just [...]

The last literary salon before the summer holidays was dedicated to female characters in classical and contemporary literature. The women’s novel in Russian classical literature is a special genre focused on the fate of women, their inner world, emotions, and the struggle between duty and personal happiness. Such works not only reflect the status of women in 19th-century society but also reveal deep psychological and moral conflicts. One of the first significant examples is Alexander Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin, where the character of Tatyana Larina became a symbol of Russian femininity — sincere, sensitive, and spiritually mature. Later, Leo Tolstoy [...]

At our previous literary salon, we discussed the novel Era of Mercy by the Vayner brothers — a work better known to most people through its screen adaptation The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed. It must be said that this is quite a controversial piece. The novel by Arkady and Georgy Vayner is not just a classic of Soviet detective fiction — it also raises timeless questions: what is more important — the letter of the law or the sense of justice? At the heart of the story are two detectives, Gleb Zheglov and Vladimir Sharapov, whose investigative approaches differ [...]