In Search of Lost Time. Volume 2. In the Shadow of the Flower Girls

Classic translation by the outstanding Ukrainian translator Anatol Perepadi

I wanted to breathe this air into myself. I stopped, and Andre, charming me with her insight, gave me the opportunity to talk to the leaves. I asked how the flowers were, the hawthorn flowers, similar to cheerful girls, mischievous, flirtatious and pious. “The young ladies left a long time ago,” the leaves answered me. And maybe they thought that although I was among their friends, I was not very familiar with their life and existence. I say that I am friends, but for many years I promise to come, but I still do not come.

"In the Shadow of the Flower Girls" is the second book in Marcel Proust's famous seven-volume epic "In Search of Lost Time," which won the Goncourt Prize for Literature (1919) in the translation by the outstanding Ukrainian translator Anatol Perepadi.

At the center of the work are first love, first friendship, and first disappointments, which mark the painful but inevitable transition from childhood to adulthood. Marcel Proust resorts to sophisticated art, combining the lyricism of feelings with the philosophy of existential search, and leads the reader through the depths of his own memory, powerless before the flow of time, and the awareness of the complexities of human relationships in French society at the beginning of the 20th century.