It is about a chess problem that doesn’t really exist, about the mysteries of Hegel’s dialectics and to logic of love: a fascinating journey to the Leningrad of the Seventies and to contemporary St Petersburg!
The life of Alexander, a freelance radio and TV author, gets out of control, and this is mainly due to Jelena, a chancy acquaintance from the Schönhauser Allee: The beautiful, dark-haired Russian woman drives his loneliness away and wins his heart, without Alexander immediately noticing this. Her tales about her previous life in Russia revive the time he spent in Leningrad in the Seventies as a student of philosophy and logic. Memories of his life in an international dormitory and of the unfathomable seminars held by professor Bergelson take the reader to a world which does not exist any more and lead him to highly up-to-date questions. When Alexander realizes that during his studies he was already in search of a »black lady«, he has to set out again, because Jelena has suddenly disappeared. Luckily, his friend Blosse, an entrepreneur, is planning a business trip to St Petersburg. Alexander accompanies him as an interpreter to the places of his past and ends up in a strange, disturbing world – always hoping to meet Jelena again.
Sparschuh manages a great feat: He presents the Seminar of Logic in Leningrad as an enclave of free thinking, he acquaints us with one of its graduates, who tries to solve the mysteries of his life, and he takes us to a post-communist metropolis on its way into an unrestrained type of capitalism – and all of this is told wistfully and with sparkling irony. With this shrewd and highly comical novel, Jens Sparschuh refers to his bestseller Der Zimmerspringbrunnen.
