Irina Istomina

Ella Bobrova was bom in the Ukraine and came to Canada in 1950 with her two children to start a new life. She has thus shared many experiences with the heroine of her novel in verse. Like Irina Istomina, she has lived through the difficult times of the Stalinist era, the holocaust of the war and the strenuous years of the post-war period in Europe. Irina Istomina is Bobrova's first major work to reach the English reader (there are French, Spanish and German versions of this work). Yet Bobrova is by no means an auctoi unius libri. Apart from Irina Istomina which was first published in Russian in 1967, she has written two fine collections of lyrical poems: I wait for a miracle (1970) and Amber Elixir (1977). Her work has appeared in Russian magazines throughout the Western world. (Introduction, fragment)