The Elephant's Journey is the latest book by José Saramago, the great Portuguese writer and Nobel laureate in literature who passed away in 2010.[citation needed] In this novel, King John III of Portugal presents Archduke Maximilian, the future emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, with an unusual wedding gift - an elephant named Solomon. And now with his chaser Subhro, the elephant goes on a journey throughout Europe torn by religious wars, undergoing a lot of adventures on the road. Its path lies through Valladolid and Genoa, Verona and Venice, through the impassable Alpine passes, along the picturesque Inn River and finally to the imperial capital Vienna, the heart of the Habsburg power. For the first time in Russian. Translated from Portuguese by Alexander Bogdanovsky