Thais Athenian. Efremov I.A.

Above his famous historical and adventure novel “Thais Athenskaya” Ivan Antonovich Efremov worked for several years. He processed mountains of historical material - a thorough and methodical scientific approach to information processing affected. After all, Ivan Antonovich existed as if in two faces. He was known as a large Soviet paleontologist, organizer of science, laboratory laboratory laboratory laboratory and participant of more than three dozen scientific expeditions. The skeletons of dinosaurs found by him in the Gobi desert entered the Golden Fund of the Moscow Paleontological Museum. Outside of the scientific circles, Ivan Antonovich became known as a large science fiction writer of the “thaw” period.

Even during the writer’s lifetime, they started talking about him as a classic of literature, a “great cosmic dreamer”, who rose on a par with such foreign liability of science fiction as Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clark and Isaac Azimov. The territory of science fiction allowed Efremov to touch those that were almost not covered in Soviet literature. He wrote about the problem of overpopulation of the planet, about the limitations of its resources, about the upcoming globalization, about the appeal to the subconscious. In his novel “Thais Athenskaya”, he boldly raised the topic of free love and talentedly stained many scenes with eroticism.

In this essay, Efremov’s thought does not rush into space, not to distant star civilizations, but into the depths of centuries that separate us from the past as reliably as from distant planets - a cosmic vacuum. In the “Thais of Athenian” Efremov managed to overcome this barrier, and we see thanks to the author’s talent in this novel, the ancient world not frozen in the marble of sculptures, but lively, colorful, trembling and invariably exciting.

The book is decorated Two artists: spouses Igor Naumovich Shalito and Galina Nikolaevna Boyko. In the sixties of the last century, Shalito's drawings appeared on the pages of the magazine “Technique - Youth”, immediately attracted the attention of readers. They looked avant -garde and did not at all resemble the illustrations made in the style of socialist realism. Also, the puddles of the books that Igor Naumovich made out with his drawings for the Eureka series, published in the publishing house “Young Guard”, also looked unusual.

In 1956, Shalito graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute, and the skills acquired in its walls allowed him to boldly cross the elements of images in his drawings-rooms. It is these drawings that you see on the pages of this book. Together with his wife, Igor Naumovich performed illustrations for all the iconic works of Efremov - “Andromeda’s nebula”, “hour of the bull”, “Blade of the razor” and “Thais of Athenian”.