The fifth volume of the bie bao series presents Ilya Zdanevich’s fictional auto-biographical writings based on his one-year stay in Istanbul in 1921.  It contains the three final chapters of PhiloSophia, a massive novel he wrote in 1930, depicting an obscure revolutionary plot evolving around Hagia Sophia. This volume also presents the first two chapters of Zdanevich’s 1929 epistolary novel Letters to Morgan Philips Price. ‘Letters’ are addressed to his journalist friend and comrade Morgan Philips, with whom they wrote a joint anti-war editorial published in the Manchester Guardian in 1916.

Both PhiloSophia and the Letters are translated and edited by Thomas J. Kitson, an acclaimed translator of Zdanevich, who has described his writing mood in these Istanbul writings as “pro-Soviet melancholy.” Illustrated with Zdanevich’s sketches of Hagia Sophia and other Byzantine churches, the volume concludes with a dizzying text by Odesa-born artist Nikolay Karabinovych, remixing PhiloSophia tailored to the “new architecture of collective security” of today’s wars and empires. Inspired by Zdanevich’s paradoxical graphomania, Karabinovych’s intervention undoes centuries-long imperial narratives.