The Kosichkina Effect

Foreword

What is this book about? It's about boys and girls, discovering for themselves a deeper meaning of such topics as love, honour, dignity. About teenagers stepping into the world of adult life believing the poetry of high feelings in the prose of everyday circumstances and daily challenges. About the young generation of our days, which sensitively caught the vibration of oncoming social changes and passionately wanting for an update on life.
This book is made up of works by young literary artists. There's no doubt, a seasoned master has an obvious advantage over a beginner writer. He sees life fuller and deeper, on his side is his experience from the years lived and wisdom birthed with that experience. But young literature has its own unique charm. It carries with itself a freshness of ideas and feelings, the aroma of the new time, the melodies of those songs that play outside the window right now, in this moment. And the most important - young authors don't teach, they don't have fully-prepared recipes, they go by the path of trials and errors, torturously peering into life, understanding the authentic value of never-changing truths. And in this directness of impressions is a pledge of truth and proof of sincere souls of the young artists.
The new generation of young writers walks into literature with a brightly-expressed thirst for integrity, with a conscious aspiration to bring the initial moral values back to life: personal dignity, love for those close to us, belief in moral ideals. Read the short stories "Pyotr's Back!" by M. Yesikóv and "Boris's Kid" by L. Basova, and you will understand how big are the feelings of compassion and mercy move the quill of the young author.
Young artists, naturally, explore the personalities of so-called "difficult" teenagers, who commit lots of rash actions, argue with teachers and parents, find themselves in difficult life situations the exit from which is linked with the need for moral choice. These young prosaics step away from simplified conflicts and primitive artistic choices. They look carefully into difficult negative processes of our lives: growth of consumer sentiment, the showing of soullessness from teenagers, the breaking of familial ties. And the pain that sounds in these stories best characterises the degree of civil involvement of the new literary generation in the urgent worries of its time.

- Yurii Lopusov