Showing results by narrator "Elena Nikitina" in All Categories

Just three weeks after my 21st birthday, on the evening of October 4, 1994, I was abducted from the streets of my hometown in Southern Russia while on my way home. They drugged me and drove to another country, where they held me captive in a tiny room at first, and then under a house in a pit. A few weeks after my kidnapping, a brutal civil war broke out. Through eight horrifying months of captivity, witnessing atrocities, surviving bombings and sexual violence, I fought desperately to stay alive, stay sane, and not to lose the one thing that kept me going: my hope.

Love. Anyone who has ever loved knows that love kills. Sometimes quickly. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes in pleasure, but more often in the agony of unbearable pain. The victim of love loses the ability to think rationally. Trying to predict your own death is pointless. The Silver Island is the first in a series of fantasy fairy tales for adults with not necessarily happily ever after: about passionate love on an island that does not exist.

"A Conversation of a Drunk with a Sober Imp" is a short story by the Russian writer and playwright Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904). Written and first published in 1886, the story is a miniature describing the meeting of a retired collegiate secretary Lakhmatov, who was pretty drunk, with the imp who suddenly appeared at night. The uninvited guest turned out to be a talkative creature who experienced the same infringements and inconveniences in his service as the retired collegiate secretary Lakhmatov.

Thirteen-year-old Varka, who lost her father, is hired as a servant and a babysitter in a shoemaker's house. All day long, she is forced to fulfill the owners’ orders, and later, she sits all night long by the cradle, trying desperately not to fall asleep. Varka knows that she would be severely beaten for that by her masters….

"Life in Questions and Exclamations" is a short story by the Russian writer and playwright Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904). Written and first published in 1882 in the journal Alarm Clock under the pseudonym Antosha Chekhonte, the short story "Life in Questions and Exclamations" is written in an unusual form of a collection of key phrases—memoirs for each stage of a man's life—childhood, adolescence, youth, the period "between 20 and 30 years", "between 30-50 years", and old age.

What Did Not Kill Me, Made Me is the second in a trilogy after the best-selling and award-winning book Girl, Taken: A True Story of Abductions, Captivity and Survival.

This book includes: "Rothschild's Violin", "The Man in a Case", "A Conversation of a Drunk with a Sober Imp", "Life in Questions and Exclamations".

The coffin-maker Yakov is shocked by his wife's illness, with whom he lived for 52 years. An understanding suddenly came to him that the woman had never seen love or affection from him for the entire time of family life. But only accusations and abuse. The husband, who fell into extreme stinginess, forbade her to drink tea, and the unfortunate woman was forced to drink empty boiling water. Her whole life was spent in work and utmost need in the tiny hut where Yakov stored, ready for sale, coffins.