Publication ceremony for the book “Damascus in 1902” by Russian writer “Stepan Kondorushkin” at the Russian Cultural Center in Damascus 

Yesterday, the Russian Cultural Center in Damascus hosted the publication ceremony of the book “The History of Damascus in 1902” by the Russian writer Stepan Kondorushkin, published by “Dar Al-Musawar Al-Arabi” in Beirut.

The content of the book was discussed and information about the aforementioned period was enriched with the participation of the head of the center, Dr. Nikolai Sukhov, and the Lebanese translator Imad al-Din Raif (via video technology).

In its first chapter, the book includes a translation of social research on Damascus at the beginning of the last century, and the second chapter is devoted to introducing Kondorushkin’s life and works, highlighting the stage of his life he spent in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine.

The book includes Kondorushkin’s third text translated into Arabic after his Lebanese stories “Kondorushkin Stories” (2016) and the collection “Syrian Stories – The Levant a Century Before by a Russian Painter” (2019), which included all of his social stories about the East that were published between 1901 and 1905 in St. Petersburg.

Kondorushkin wrote his research in a cinematic style that enables the reader to touch the movement in the city in that era.

It should be noted that Kondorushkin’s relationship with the city of Damascus has an important personal dimension.

In Damascus, he fell in love with the director of one of the association’s schools, Elizaveta Ribner, so they get married in 1902, and his first daughter, Anna, was born in the city in 1903, before they left Syria for St. Petersburg.

O.M