Ilsur Metshin met with the Kazan writer Guzel Yakhina

The author discussed with Mayor the filming of the novel “Zuleikha opens her eyes” and presented her new book.

(KZN.RU, May 7, Ksenia Shvetsova). Ilsur Metshin, the Mayor of Kazan, met with the writer Guzel Yakhina today. The author discussed with Mayor the filming of her first novel “Zuleikha opens her eyes” and presented her new novel “My Children” to the head of the Tatarstan’s capital.

The new novel by Kazan writer Guzel Yakhina will appear on the shelves of bookstores in the second half of May. Guzel Yakhina will present the book personally to Kazan readers. Several meetings will be held in the capital of Tatarstan on June 5, where she will present a new novel. “The novel has long been ready, the first print run has been printed. The first presentation will be held in Moscow on May 14, when the books are already on sale”, said G. Yakhina. “The novel “My Children” tells about the Volga Germans, about the fate of the German autonomy on the Volga in 1918-1941”.

For the first time, the lines from the new novel were sounded during the last Russian “Total Dictation”. It was the main text for the dictation. “I read out tiny bits of the adapted version of the novel In Vladivostok”, noted the writer.

Among other things, Guzel Yakhina and the Mayor of Kazan discussed the filming of the debut book of the writer “Zuleikha opens her eyes”. The novel, which tells of dekulakization in the 1930s, brought fame to the author and won many awards, including the “Bolshaya Kniga”, “Yasnaya Polyana”, and “The Book of the Year” awards, as well as the “Star Ticket”, which is held as part of the annual Kazan festival “Aksenov-fest”.

According to the writer, preparations for the shooting of the film have now begun. But since the project is expensive and time-consuming, it is too early to speak about any specific results. “This complicated project requires a lot of traveling, filming in various places: Kazan, near Kazan, in the Tatar village, in the Siberian forest. And this Siberia cannot be shot somewhere near Kazan or St. Petersburg, it should be a wild forest”, said G. Yakhina. “I want this to be a high-quality special project. So it's clear that all this lasts a long time because the preparation of a good serial project is at least a few years”.

It is planned to film the novel in a multi-part film, in total it will consist of 8 episodes. Now there is a preparatory work and adaptation of the script. But the writer already has dreams about who could play the main character in the film, the Tatar peasant woman, to who experiencing all the difficulties of the times of dispossession. “My dream is unchanged: I would very much like Chulpan Khamatova to play the main role in the film”, shared G. Yakhina. “I gladly repeat this every time, I see only her in this role, and even at the stage of writing the novel I pictured her as the heroine”.

The head of the city wished success in the large-scale project and promised to give the Kazan author possible support.

Guzel Yakhina was born in Kazan in 1977, graduated from the Kazan State Pedagogical University and the Moscow School of Cinema. The debut novel “Zuleikha opens her eyes”, which made the writer famous, was written in 2015.