Thais of Athens

The action of the famous historical-adventure novel by Ivan Antonovich Efremov (1908-1972) "Tais of Athens" takes place in the era of Alexander the Great and the founder of the new ruling dynasty of Egypt, Ptolemy I. This last novel of the writer describes many historical figures of the time, transferred from the depths of the ages to the pages of the book. The main character is a historical figure, the hetaera Tais. The text is printed without censorship cuts. The edition is decorated with illustrations by artists Igor Shalito and Galina Boiko.
Ivan Antonovich Efremov worked for several years on his famous historical-adventure novel "Tais of Athens". He processed mountains of historical material - the effect of a careful and methodical scientific approach to the processing of information. After all, Ivan Antonovich existed as if in two persons. One he was known as a major Soviet paleontologist, organizer of science, Stalin Prize winner, head of the laboratory and participant in more than three dozen scientific expeditions. The dinosaur skeletons he found in the Gobi Desert were included in the golden fund of the Moscow Paleontological Museum. Outside of scientific circles, Ivan Antonovich became known as a major science fiction writer of the "thaw" period. Even during his lifetime, the writer was spoken of as a classic of literature, "the great space dreamer", who stood on a par with such foreign coryphees of science fiction as Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. The territory of science fiction allowed Efremov to touch on topics that were almost never covered in Soviet literature. He wrote about the problem of overpopulation of the planet, its limited resources, the coming globalization, the appeal to the subconscious ... In his novel "Tais of Athens" he boldly raised the theme of free love and talented painted many scenes with eroticism. In this work, Efremov's thought rushes not into space, not to distant stellar civilizations, but into the depths of centuries, which separate us from the past as reliably as from distant planets - the cosmic vacuum. In "Tais of Athens" Efremov managed to overcome this barrier, and we see thanks to the talent of the author in this novel, the ancient world is not frozen in the marble of sculptures, but alive, colorful, fluttering and always exciting. The book is decorated with illustrations made by two artists: spouses Igor Naumovich Shalito and Galina Nikolaevna Boyko. In the sixties of the last century, Shalito's drawings, appearing on the pages of the magazine "Technics for Youth", immediately attracted the attention of readers. They looked avant-garde and quite different from the illustrations made in the style of socialist realism. The covers of the books that Igor Naumovich decorated with his drawings for the series "Eureka", published in the publishing house "Young Guardia" looked just as catchy and unusual. In 1956, Shalito graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute, and the skills he acquired there allowed him to boldly cross elements of images in his drawing compositions. These are the kind of drawings you see on the pages of this book. Together with his wife, Igor Naumovich executed illustrations for all of Efremov's landmark works - "The Andromeda Nebula", "The Hour of the Bull", "The Razor's Blade" and "The Tais of Athens".