John Maxwell Coetzee was born in South Africa, worked in England and the USA, and lives in Australia. A two-time Booker laureate and Nobel Prize winner in literature, he has not attended any awards ceremonies, gives few interviews and lives, one might say, as a recluse. He rarely talks about his work, and almost never about himself. All the more unique is the “autobiographical” trilogy “Scenes from the Life of a Provincial”, full of episodes of shocking frankness, “the reader is presented with a most detailed, unvarnished, mosaic portrait of a creator striving only for what is not easy to achieve. Not all the facts coincide with what we know about the biography of the real Coetzee, but the resulting stereo effect is all the more interesting” (The Seattle Times). From childhood in the South African countryside, through youth at Cape Town University and cold London to the “summertime” of manhood, we see Coetzee (or “Coetzee”) as close as we have ever seen: “a self-portrait that is uncompromisingly confessional and at the same time intricately shaky.” (The New York Review of Books).The trilogy is published in translation by Sergei Ilyin (1948–2017), the famous interpreter of the works of Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Heller, T. H. White and Mervyn Peake, Stephen Fry, Michel Faber and many other modern classics. The translation was prepared back in 2011, but is being published for the first time.