Золотая ослица

A novel-allusion about love and afterlife, written by a woman, in Russia, on domestic male material. "The Golden Ass" is a cyclical work, where everything is subject to the logic of the narrator. In this way, Elena Chernikova's novel is similar to such well-known works of world literature as Boccaccio's Decameron, Margaret of Navarre's Heptameron and, of course, A Thousand and One Nights. Unless there are two narrators in Elena Chernikova's novel. But they tell the same story-fate, only alternately and in different details. The rhythm of the "Golden Ass" is intermittent, like a breath heated up by a run.
Elena Chernikova uses catharsis as a sudden escalation of the narration from frank outrageousness into tragedy. One of the most surprising fragments of the novel is the transformation of the main character into a man, while maintaining synchronous female and male thinking. This Neo-Platonic androgyny of the hero/heroine is one of the absolute revelations of The Golden Ass. Chernikov's androgyne, dressed in a male body, thinks both as a man and as a woman. The lack of male experience is compensated in the new being by an excess of female.