Lizok's Bookshelf

Shulpyakov’s Fez: It’s in the Head, Not on the Head

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 20:13:00 +0000

Fez isn't about a hat.

First, a bit on expectations: Gleb Shulpyakov’s Фес (Fez) isn’t about cylindrical red hats with tassels, though Fez’s part-time narrator does cover his head with a fez at one point in the book. And Fez doesn’t seem to take place in Fez, Morocco. But who knows? The most important exotica here—despite mentions of specific places like Moscow and Vienna—is abstract and spiritual, a place in the consciousness.

A summary of this short, novelesque work with a broken narrative might start with something like this: An unnamed Moscow publisher with business troubles takes his wife to the birth house, goes home, and somehow ends up a prisoner in a basement in an unidentified place. A place one might think is Fez.

Those of you who watch my “Up Next” notes may have observed that my own journey with Fez zigged and zagged: I first found the book oddly beguiling (or beguilingly odd) then hit a slow patch then thought Fez was shaping up then concluded by considering it a “a somewhat disappointing up-and-down experience.” Looking back today, I’d edit out the “somewhat.”

Fez’s allegory of unnamed man’s journey to rebirth, which occurs roughly simultaneously with the birth of his child, had lots of potential—he’s a prisoner, he escapes, he seems to be in a boat with a Charon-like guy, he reflects on his life, he meets a woman and they talk about freedom, and he comes to terms with what’s happening—but I thought the book’s end message felt too usual, too expected, too close to hokey, particularly because most of Fez seemed intentionally cryptic. And Shulpyakov didn’t win many points from me for his inclusions of dreamy states, doors leading to new lives that avoid former emptiness and constraints, and eastern themes. These are elements I’ve seen a lot, elements that are only interesting if a writer gives them unexpected angles.

Shulpyakov sometimes manages to do that: he’s also a poet, and his uses of language and imagery were the biggest positives in Fez. Small highlights included a memory of a Soviet-era building in Minsk, self-deprecating humor, and a lovely vision of morning lights. But there weren’t nearly enough of those moments to perk up all the familiar material, especially since the literary devices in Fez—which contains sections with first-person and third-person narrative, chronicle-like passages, a few pages in what appears to be Arabic (I have no idea if it’s a logical text), and a page with only lines of dots/periods (an excerpt: “………………………….”)—struck me as self-conscious attempts at creating something postmodern rather than ways to add true depth, wisdom, or intellectual excitement to the book.

My primary impression of Fez is that I went into the book thinking it sounded like yet another parallel reality novel, which it is on a certain level, and came out of Fez reminded of commenter Alex’s mention of “stories about careworn middle-aged Russian men finding satori” in the comments about my post on Oleg Zaionchkovskii’s Happiness Is Possible. I think I’d recommend Fez most to readers who have much more patience than I with the combination of spiritual material and literary devices that Shulpyakov employs. Fez just isn’t my kind of book but, to be fair, Shulpyakov’s Web site displays positive critical reviews, some of which contain gargantuan spoilers.

Up Next: Alisa Ganieva’s energetic, colorful long story Салам тебе, Далгат! (Salam Dalgat!), a nice antidote to Fez: the story presents a down-to-earth portrait of a young man’s day in Dagestan. I’ll combine Dalgat with a brief trip report since Ganieva is in the Debut Prize group I’ll hear speak in Cambridge, MA, on February 22. Then a translation roundup and Roman Senchin’s Информация (The Information).

Image credit: topfer, via stock.xchng.

National Bestseller’s 2012 Longlist

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:15:00 +0000

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again: I’ve grown to love literary award longlists because they always seem to contain at least a dozen books or manuscripts worth investigating. And I especially enjoy the National Bestseller longlist because it notes each book’s nominator. Some interesting bits for 2012:

Most of this year’s 45 nominators seem to stick to the award’s main principle of recognizing and promoting writers whose books haven’t—yet—become bestsellers. Even if this is only the third consecutive year, it seems that someone nominates Viktor Pelevin every damn year: this year critic Veronika Emelina did the honors, nominating Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F., which (I wouldn’t-couldn’t make this up), as I post on February 12, 2012, tops the sales lists on pro-books.ru.

Last year’s Yasnaya Polyana award winner, Mikhail Tarkovskii, was nominated for Распилыш, which drew my attention because it was first on the list and because its title is rooted in words related to sawing, like распил (saw cut) and распилить (to saw up). (Translation credit: Oxford Russian-English dictionary.) It turns out that распилыш (raspilysh) is a term for used Japanese cars that are imported to Russia in pieces, to avoid import duties. The things I learn through these book titles! Appropriately, Tarkovskii’s book was nominated by Vasilii Avchenko, author of Правый руль (Wheel on the Right), a book about, yes, Japanese used cars in the Russian Far East.

Three books were nominated twice: Aleksandr Grigorenko’s Мэбэт. История человека тайги (Mebet. The Story of a Person from the Taiga), a book Lev Danilkin says is initially difficult to read because it’s filled with unfamiliar terminology and names, though he says the text in this novel about a favorite of the gods quickly becomes transparent. The other books nominated twice are Nataliia Sokolovskaia’s Любовный канон (something like The Love Canon), a collection of stories, and Anna Starobinets’s Живущий, a novel in which all of humanity becomes the one living organism of the title. Yikes!

Two books were written by writers who will be at the East Cost “Primary Sources” events I mentioned in last week’s post: Irina Bogatyreva’s Товарищ Анна (Comrade Anna), a story collection that sounds like fun, and Alisa Ganieva’s manuscript Праздничная гора, which could be something like Holiday Mountain or Festive Mountain. I’ll try to remember to ask her about it!

What else? I was more than ecstatic to see that Vladislav Otroshenko’s manuscript of the collection Языки Нимродовой башни (The Languages of Nimrod’s Tower) was nominated: I’m finishing a translation of the title story. I was also very happy to see Roman Senchin’s Информация (The Information), which friends just brought me from Moscow. And I’ve enjoyed reading Iurii Buida, so was glad to find his Жунгли (The Jungle), a collection of stories, on the list.

Three others: Lev Danilkin nominated Vladimir Mikushevich’s Таков ад (perhaps a jaunty That’s Hell for You... for some reason, I like this book’s title), a collection of stories Danilkin says are strange, carnivalistic apocryphal works; his blurb gives the impression that they are both funny and fun. Finally, one author, Aleksei Nikitin, had two books nominated: Истеми (İstemi), a NOSE longlister about students in 1984 who create a geopolitical game, and Маджонг (Mahjong), which sounds even more cryptic, with its sleep/wake theme.

Another Author Event Note: Writer Andrey Kurkov will be making several appearances in New York and Connecticut this month: the evening of February 21^st at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, CT; noon on February 23^rd at the Harriman Institute in NYC, and the evening of February 23^rd at Partners & Crime Bookstore in NYC. I didn’t even realize Melville House has brought out another of Kurkov’s books: the new book is The Case of the General’s Thumb.

Disclosures: I have met or translated work by several writers mentioned in this post.

Up next: Gleb Shul’pyakov’s Фес (Fez), which was a somewhat disappointing up-and-down experience, Alisa Ganieva’s Salam, Dalgat!, an ever-growing translation roundup, and Petersburg-Leningrad.

Awards, Awards, Awards + Events

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:07:00 +0000

The 2012 NOS Literary Prize was awarded yesterday to Igor’ Vishnevetskii’s Ленинград (Leningrad), a work that takes place during the beginning of the blockade of Leningrad and includes passages with documentary material and poetry. Vishnevetskii has cited inspirations such as characters in Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg, whom he imagined in new situations, and Sergei Loznitsa’s film Блокада (Blockade). Though Leningrad is available online, from Novyi mir on Zhurnal’nyi zal, it doesn’t appear to have been published in book form. I hope that changes: I’d love to read Leningrad but it has the look of a complex work that I want to read as a physical book, not as a printout or file for the e-reader. I read portions of an interview with Vishnevetskii, who is also a poet and music historian, but had to stop: the book already intrigues me so I don’t want to know more! The NOS reader’s choice award went to Andrei Astvatsaturov for Скунскамера (Skunkamera). I listed NOS finalists in this previous post.

Another award: poet and prose writer Nikolai Kononov (whose novel The Flâneur was also on the Nose shortlist) won the Iurii Kazakov award for 2011 for his short story “Аметисты” (“Amethysts”), published by Znamia in August 2011. OpenSpace.ru’s item about the award lists five other finalist stories, some of which are also available on Zhurnal’nyi zal. Three other stories—Vsevolod Benigsen’s “Глебов-младший” (perhaps “Glebov the Younger”… depending on context and tone), Leonid Iuzefovich’s “Поздний звонок. 1995” (“A Late Telephone Call. 1995”), and Marina Vishnevetskaia’s “Бабкин оклад” (“The Old Woman’s Icon Frame”… a quick glance makes it look like that’s the kind of “oklad” that’s intended, not a salary!)—were also published in Znamia. Ksenia Dragunskaia’s “Куртка Воннегута” (“Vonnegut’s Jacket” – the title plays on the Russian word for jacket, kurtka), appeared in Novyi mir in May 2011. The last story is Anna Matveeva’s “Обстоятельство времени” (perhaps “The Circumstance of Time”).

Academia Rossica wrote to ask if I would mention their fourth annual Rossica Young Translators Award. I’m very happy to: this is a wonderful competition that the organization says is “designed to inspire and encourage young translators from Russian around the world and expose them to the best of contemporary Russian literature.” Translators must be no older than 24 at the submission deadline, which is the ides of March. Entrants must translate one of three brief passages; the excerpts are taken from recent books by Viktor Pelevin, Figgle-Miggle, and Dmitri Bykov. Further information is available here.

Finally, Causa Artium will host five Russian writers at “Primary Sources” events in four locations on the East Coast: Washington, DC, on February 15, New York City on February 18, Bard College on February 20, and Boston (well, Cambridge...) on February 22. The writers are novelist Olga Slavnikova, who heads up the Debut Prize, and four Debut winners and finalists: Alisa Ganieva, Dmitry Biryukov, Irina Bogatyreva, and Igor Savelyev. I’ve enjoyed hearing Ganieva, Bogatyreva, and Savelyev speak at book fairs so am looking forward to the Boston event. Let me know if you’ll be there so I can look for you! All four events are free. And refreshments will be served. The event has a page on Facebook, here.

P.S. Here's an article from OpenSpace.ru that analyzes jury discussion and lists votes.

Up Next: Gleb Shul’pyakov’s Фес (Fez), a short novel that felt oddly beguiling or beguilingly odd last week, then hit a slow patch, then seemed to begin to shape up. We’ll see what happens tonight. Then, in preparation for Primary Sources, I think I’ll read Alisa Ganieva’s Салам тебе, Далгат, which was translated by Nicholas Allen as Salam, Dalgat! and credited to Ganieva’s pseudonym, Gulla Khirachev, in the Squaring the Circle anthology. Also coming: translation roundup and more Petersburg-Leningrad…

Disclosures: The usual... I know/have met with people from some of the organizations mentioned in this post.

A Few of Max Frei’s Echo Stories

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:13:00 +0000

Writing about a few medium-length stories from Max Frei’s Labyrinths of Echo books feels like breaking my own unwritten blogging rules: I rarely write about books I haven’t finished, and I rarely write about books I read over long stretches of time. In this case, I think “long” means two years, meaning my memory of the first three stories has faded. A lot.

But there are extenuating circumstances: I read two more stories this month and Frei, whose real name is Svetlana Martynchik, has written a giant stack of Echo books that I’m unlikely to read and finish within the next year or two or three. Plus two volumes of English-language translations exist and a third is coming soon. Volume one, The Stranger, contains the first seven stories. Though I have no desire to read a crate of Echo books volume after volume, I’ve enjoyed a few stories at a time and will certainly read more…

The five Echo stories that I read fall into a fuzzy genre of fantasy that combines cozy with sinister: a first-person narrator named Max describes his new life in a world called Echo. Max tells us in an introduction that Echo doesn’t exist on any map but the city is the capital of the United Kingdom of such places as Uguland, Landaland, and Uruland. Residents perform magic at varying levels of ability, and Max works as nocturnal representative of the most venerable head of Echo’s Minor Secret Investigative Force, which solves crimes. (I’ve taken translations of titles and lines from the book from Polly Gannon's translation,visible through Look Inside! on Amazon.com.)

Though the Echo stories begin with Max telling about his earthly difficulties getting to sleep at night, it’s only a few stories later that we learn the particulars of how Max’s boss, a Sir Juffin Hully—Echo sounds like a rather title-happy place—brought him to Echo, where Max is passed off as a clueless guy from the sticks to explain away his social ineptness. It didn’t take much to bring Max to Echo: Max first meets Sir Juffin in a dream, then makes the dream a reality (of sorts). Max’s dream life is pretty rich, and I scribbled “lucid dream” several times during my reading. All those foggy lines between dreams and reality brought me back to recent reading, like Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” (previous post) and Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

As I mentioned above, Max’s stories combine cozy and sinister. Frei juxtaposes humorous names and fanciful objects with, for example, a serial killer case. And Frei’s cast of characters loves drinking a beverage, apparently caffeinated, called kamra; Max says an establishment known as Обжора Бунба, which Gannon calls the Glutton Bunba, serves the best kamra in Echo. Gluttony for food and glory leads to particularly strange and nasty consequences in “Король Банджи” (“King Banjee”), in which a woman reports that her husband has turned into a (rather large) piece of meat with a distinctive smell. Soup has oddities, too.

I think the Echo stories appealed to me for their blend of earth-bound fears with out-of-this-world oddities. Then there’s all that Max and I have in common: a preference for night, the need for kamra, and, yes, a deep love of sleep. I’m certainly not a dangerous type like Max, though: Lady Melamori, whom Max fancies, feels he exudes some sort of threat. Two other things: though I enjoy cooking, Echo’s quick food delivery appeals to me, particularly since places like Glutton Bunba bring food nearly instantaneously after receipt of a mind message. Finally, I love that in Echo there are many bathtubs but no TV… but I certainly appreciated Max’s reference to Twin Peaks, in which he thinks about what he would have done had he been agent Cooper.

For more: Robert Thompson on Fantasy Book Critic offers lots more detail on the Echo stories in The Stranger.

Level for non-native readers of English: 3.5 out of 5.00, though I think my biggest language-related problem was sorting through all the Echo vocabulary. I admit I have a hard time keeping track of character names in all languages.

Up Next: NOSE prize winners. Gleb Shulpyakov’s Фес (Fez), an oddly beguiling (or beguilingly odd?) NOSE finalist that friends just brought back from Moscow for me. [Update on 1/31/2012: I just checked the NOSE site for the award calendar and found that Fez was taken off the shortlist... a quick check of comments on OpenSpace.ru's news story showed that Fez was an on-again-off-again shortlister.] And more St. Petersburg…

Disclosures: The usual. I always enjoy talking with Overlook Press, which published English-language translations of Max Frei’s books. And yes, the link to Amazon is connected with my affiliate account.

Back to Classics: Two of Gogol's Petersburg Stories

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 22:40:00 +0000

The Writer: Nikolai Gogol’

Dates: The story “Невский Проспект” (“Nevsky Prospect”) was published in 1835. “The Nose” was published in 1836.

Why they’re important: I’ll forgo the scholarly and methodical in favor of a selfish big-picture summary that fits my current reading: “Nevsky Prospect” and “The Nose” are part of a cycle of Gogol’s stories based in St. Petersburg that contribute to the city’s mythos. (I’m appropriating the word “mythos” from Antonina Bouis’s translation of Solomon Volkov’s St. Petersburg.) Gogol contributes to a curious procession of Petersburg prose and poetry—which includes Pushkin in the early years and (I suspect) continues to the present day—that describes a city with dualistic dreaminess, devilish figures, apparently inanimate objects that come to life, and other strange occurrences. “The Overcoat” (previous post) is still my favorite of Gogol’s Petersburg stories.

Some basic writings about the stories: I’ve particularly enjoyed reading chunks of Dina Khapaeva’s Кошмар: литература и жизнь (Nightmare: Literature and Life), an inviting book that takes an appropriately nightmare-driven look at Gogol’s stories. I also appreciate Vladimir Nabokov’s mentions of Russian nose expressions, plus a discussion in Gogol’ of the nose-conscious writer, dying, with “hideous black clusters of chaetopod worms sucking at his nostrils.” And I still enjoy Gary Saul Morson’s article “‘Absolute nonsense’”—Gogol’s tales,” from The New Criterion, which calls “The Nose” “totally absurd.”

Another appreciation: Victor Terras’s statement in A History of Russian Literature that “’The Nose’ is a piece of virtuosic writing. Still the vast scholarly attention it has received seems excessive.” I dearly love “The Nose”—I’ve read it many times over the years—but, as an individual with a rather long nose that’s highly sensitive to pollen, down, and dust, I have to say that sometimes an annoying nose is just an annoying nose. And sometimes I wish mine would disappear.

ИМХО/IMHO: First, a bit of context: I read “Nevsky Prospect” and “The Nose” to begin what I envisioned as a brief St. Petersburg reading spree: Gogol, Bely’s Petersburg, and then a contemporary Petersburg novel… but then I started wondering why I hadn’t begun with Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades,” which I’ve always loved, and why I hadn’t considered rereading something from Dostoevsky—maybe Crime and Punishment or The Double?—before Bely. The more I read and reread, the more connections I make, and reading Volkov’s St. Petersburg only adds to the fun. Meaning: I’ll probably focus a lot of this year’s reading on fiction based in St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad… though much of my spring reading will center on writers coming to BookExpo America in June.

Onward! I picked up Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” because the first page of Bely’s Petersburg mentioned Nevsky Prospect, the main street in St. Petersburg. Accordingly, my focus on Nevsky and Petersburg, as literary settings, frames my thoughts on the story. The story begins by telling the reader that there’s nothing better than Nevsky—at least not in St. Petersburg—and Gogol quickly establishes it as a place where people promenade and forget about whatever needs to be done. Though a part of everyday life, Nevsky is also apart from everyday life. At the end of the story, the reader is instructed not to believe Nevsky, it’s all a (day)dream and a deception, and a demon lights the lamps to show everything in a false light.

Gogol’s sandwich of a story has two substantive subplots that begin as one line: two men walking down the street espy women that they follow. [Warning: spoilers follow...] An artist follows a woman to a house of ill repute and dreams of saving her, and an officer follows a woman to her home, where she lives with her husband, a German craftsman named Schiller, who has a friend named Hoffman(n). Cultural references, anyone?

I found the artist thread particularly interesting, with its fuzzy combination of reality, dreams, and opium use: the poor man finds himself in a fog, drawn by beauty and glad for a миг (an instant) of happiness, but his life becomes a topsy-turvy mess of sleepy days and alert nights. The officer thread offers a fight that reminded me a bit much of Gogol’s Ukraine-based stories, but a nose-threatening scene was a plus. Most striking: I was surprised at how uncomfortable and uneasy, even queasy, I felt after reading “Nevsky Prospect” at night: everything felt grotesque and distorted thanks to Gogol’s mishmash of the grotesque and the romantic plus that demon lamplighter who feels like an evil emcee for his city, a place where any twisted thing might happen. Be careful what you wish for.

A monument to the nose
in question

As for “The Nose,” well, it’s the pure absurdity that’s always appealed to me: a story that begins with a barber finding a nose in a loaf of fresh breakfast bread is my kind of story. Gogol continues by introducing the reader to a certain Mr. Kovalev, former possessor of the nose, who later locates his nose as it walks the street, in uniform and with eyebrows. Of course the fact (or not?) that The Nose prays adds further appeal.

Though “The Nose” is funnier and less ominous than “Nevsky Prospect,” the two stories share plenty. It should come as no surprise that Mr. Kovalev is given to strolling Nevsky, in a clean and starched collar. Later in the story he says that the devil played a trick on him, though a bit later still he’s not sure whether he’s been dreaming. Or perhaps drank vodka instead of water. Like “Nevsky Prospect,” “The Nose” also includes references to dreams, reality, and event-obscuring fog. The narrator also tacks on a confused summary of events, not quite sure himself what was true and what was invented but concluding that these things can happen, albeit rarely. Sweet dreams!

P.S. I enjoyed looking at artist Mikhail Bychkov’s illustrations for “Nevsky Prospect.”

P.P.S. Mapping St. Petersburg has two maps, with helpful tags, for Gogol's Petersburg Tales, here.

Level for non-native readers of Russian: 4.0/5.0.

Up Next: Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. Leonid Iuzefovich’s Князь ветра (Prince of the Wind), the last of Iuzefovich’s three Petersburg detective novels: this one fits with Bely because there’s a Mongolian connection. I’ll also report on Volkov’s St. Petersburg at some time: I’m reading it slowly and enjoying it very much. I’d love to hear readers’ recommendations of novels written by contemporary writers that take place in St. Petersburg, Petrograd, or Leningrad. I may also put together a brief post about some of Max Frey’s “Echo” stories, which (surprise!) blend reality and dreams. I’ve read four or five of the stories in the last year or so, and they’ve come in handy lately as filler reading when I’m overloaded on the intense wordplay of Petersburg.

Guest Post by Olga Bukhina: Russian Magic Realism for Young Adult Readers

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:42:00 +0000

I’d never considered inviting anyone to write a guest post for the Bookshelf until I met Olga Bukhina at the American Literary Translators Association conference in November. When I learned that Olga specializes in translating young adult books from English into Russian and writing about YA literature, I remembered Bookshelf commenters’ questions about Russian young adult fiction that I couldn’t answer. So I asked Olga if she’d like to write a post about Russian novelists who write for young adults. She agreed.

Olga’s translations include Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy and Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, and she is the co-author of Язык твой - друг мой (Your Language Is My Friend). She co-wrote Your Language with her sister, with whom she often collaborates on translations. The book is part of Liudmila Ulitskaya’s series for children. Olga also writes about YA books for a new blog created by the Working Group for Study of Russian Children’s Literature and Culture during the November conference of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

I was especially happy to learn Olga wanted to mention Miriam Petrosyan’s Дом, в котором… (The House That…), a book that’s been highly praised by adults of all ages but that I was disappointed not to enjoy. (The House is also the subject of Olga’s latest WGRCLC post.) A huge thank you to Olga for writing this post!

Three is a magic number, and there are three names in Russian magic realism literature for teenagers. All three are women relatively new to the literary world.

Muscovite Dina Sabitova writes about parents and adoption; she writes out of experience. Already a mother of two, she adopted a 16 year old girl. Her book Where Winter Does Not Come (Где нет зимы) was published by Samokat (2011), one of the most interesting small publishing houses for children in Moscow.

This book is about two children, a teenage boy Pavel, who has a very serious attitude toward life; and his little sister Gul’, who dearly loves her rag doll, Ljal’ka, made by her grandma. This doll is one of the narrators in the book. The grandmother, the corner stone of the family, dies, and the mother soon disappears. Two children are left to their own devices with very little money and an even smaller supply of food. After an attempt to manage on their own, they are taken to the orphanage, with two “protectors,” Ljal’ka and an ancient house elf Aristarkh who is invisible to all but Pavel, left behind in their old shabby house.

It is a tragic story; and the book’s unexpected turns and twists make the reader’s heart ready to stop. It is the most uplifting story imaginable, full of hope. After the news about the death of her mother, Gul’ loses her desire to live. She does not even care about the loss of her beloved Ljal’ka. Deus ex machina style (apart of the fact that this part is actually based on a true story), the mother of Gul’s best friend decides to adopt her. Happy end? Not yet.

Sabitova’s most recent book, Your Three Names (Три твоих имени, Rozovij Zhiraf, 2011), is about a little girl who gets a new name and a new life in each version of her story. Ritka/Margo/Goshka’s life goes through various ordeals: drunken, poverty-stricken parents, foster care, and an orphanage.

Miriam Petrosyan, an animator from Erevan, wrote a huge volume about the life in a boarding school for children and teens with various physical problems (and of course, mental and psychological). The House That (Дом, в котором…, Livebook, 2009), which got several prestigious awards, is an epic drama and a phantasmagoric, nightmarish story of kids who are stuck with their disabilities. For them, the House is a safe haven and a prison at the same time. Each group of kids lives in its own dormitory and forms a Pack with its own Leader. Many of them are in wheelchairs or with prostheses; for many, the House is the only home they know.

Each kid has a nickname, Sphinx, Blind, Smoker, and even Death (and girls, Mermaid, Witch, Ginger). We never learn their real names, or the names of the principal and counselors. The reality of life, with its regular school program and everyday breakfasts and lunches, intermixes with dreams, nightmares, and fantasies creating a heavy, dense prose that’s enjoyable and scary to read.

Ekaterina Murashova is a child psychologist in St. Petersburg and the author of three novels. The Correction Class (Класс коррекции, Samokat, 2007) is a miniature Petrosyan House/class for physically disabled and mentally handicapped children with whom teachers (and often their parents) have no idea what to do. With the help of a new student, others in the class are now able to take refuge in a dreamland where they are not disabled any more, and everyone looks “beautiful and serious.” Some things from that magic land can even be taken into the ordinary and difficult “real” life.

The Alarm Guard (Гвардия тревоги, “Samokat,” 2008) is again about a class, but a very different one. Kids of this class are organized in a group which helps everyone who needs their help, from a crow on a tree to a homeless child in a manhole. It is a book about collectivism in the best meaning of this word and about individual responsibility for this world.

One Miracle for the Whole Life (Одно чудо на всю жизнь, Narnia Publishers, 2010) brings together those who are rarely seen together: nice, “clean” kids from a city school, a gang of under-aged criminals, and two extraterrestrial siblings. It is a story of miracle healings of deadly diseases and the wounded, suffering hearts of children and adults.

Can these stories be told without magic realism? No, they are too full of pain, suffering, and, indeed, the most real reality of life.

Up next: Two of Gogol’s Petersburg stories, then Bely’s Petersburg, then, probably Bykov’s Ostromov. I’m also reading Solomon Volkov’s thoroughly engaging St. Petersburg: A Cultural History; I’m reading the book in Antonina W. Bouis’s translation.

Freedom’s Just Another Word: Ivan D.’s Big Liberty

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:48:00 +0000

Publisher Ad Marginem’s “autobiographical novel” description on the back of Dmitrii Dobrodeev’s Большая svoboda Ивана Д. (Ivan D.’s Big Liberty) feels utterly superfluous: with many dateline-ish chapter starts, real-life figures, and historical events worked into the story of a man who leaves the Soviet Union, first for Hungary, then for West Germany, the book has the feel of a documentary novel that could only have been written by someone who lived “it.” Which Dobrodeev has done, living in Germany and the Czech Republic since 1989. And Dobrodeev, like Ivan D., worked at Radio Liberty. Dobrodeev said in an interview with Echo of Moscow that about 90 percent of the book is true, with a “documentary basis,” and that he included his own experiences in his Ivan D., a composite figure for his generation.

I’ve written more than once that I’m not a fan of finding real people in contemporary fiction… but Dobrodeev somehow makes the device work, including people like 1991 coup plotter Genadii Yanaev, a pre-LDPR Vladimir Zhirnivoskii, and journalist Andrei Babitskii in Ivan D. Honestly, I’m surprised the book worked for me at all: it’s told in very spare, nearly affectless language and combines a good dose of abstraction (условность) with its facts. Still, Ivan D. is that odd case of a book that fascinated even when it was a crashing bore. Perhaps that’s what Dobrodeev intended: life west of the old Iron Curtain may sound romantic or exciting, particularly when spy agencies are involved and there’s freedom, but it can also be pretty dull. Emigration, we’re told, isn’t развлечение; the old cliché “fun and games” works well here.

Ivan D. is a man with mixed feelings about the Soviet Union. He hates that he was невыездной (not allowed to travel) for years, unable to use his talents, and living in relative poverty. But he also dislikes the changes of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, which he thinks demean Russia’s history. Toward the end of the book Ivan D. visits Moscow as a Radio Liberty correspondent during the events of October 1993, seeing the Russian White House after it was bombed by the government. He comes away thinking what happened was грязно, dirty, and that it marks the end of historical Russia. At least the Soviet Union valued brotherhood and solidarity.

Ivan D.’s stated preference is for personal freedom, something he takes advantage of in his life in Germany after (of course!) he’s spent time in a remote location offering analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union to the German government. Ivan D. also hears Russian writers read (Vladimir Sorokin and Viktor Erofeev are among those mentioned), has odd dreams that probably indicate his freest thoughts, and eventually moves in with a Russian woman. They live like, well, libertines, with lots of alcohol and rumors of orgies. Their lifestyle is a magnification of norms at their workplace; that Radio Liberty group is quite a bunch.

Throughout all this, Ivan sometimes feels his self (“я”) disintegrating and he has a tendency to forget who he is and where he’s from. He’s also disturbed when a veteran co-worker from the station is buried in Germany, among alien souls (“среди чужих душ”). Ivan doesn’t feel right anywhere, though a reunion with his wife in his old Moscow apartment at the end of the book gives him the chance to see his daughter and smell old smells. In some ways, I think Ivan D. feels freest there. The book’s chapters end with a vibe of “the more things change the more they stay the same.” Dobrodeev clinches that by supplementing the chapters with a few addenda, Radio Liberty correspondence about Ivan D. Indeed, the more things change the more they stay the same.

I’m not sure how much I liked Ivan D.’s Big Liberty—Dobrodeev’s style isn’t a favorite but I appreciate his portrayals of people and a time and think he combines abstraction and concreteness to very good effect—and I would only recommend it with the caution that it’s a rather peculiar book that’s not likely to appeal to everyone. (Of course I could say that about just about everything I read but I won’t expand on that right now…)

All that said, the novel was an interesting counterpoint to my own experiences during the era, when I traveled to Russia and eventually moved there: I heard the bombing of the Russian White House in October ’93 and complaints from people who wanted firmer control than Yeltsin’s. As I wrote this post, I realized that the book probably succeeded for me more than I initially thought. Dobrodeev’s story about an abstract, albeit self-referential, Ivan without a country manages to convey a lot about the sad and sometimes humorous messiness and contradictions of cultural, political, and personal freedoms during and directly after the fall of the Soviet Union.

For more: Ad Marginem has links to reviews.

Level for nonnative readers of Russian: 2.5/5.0. Not especially difficult. Short sentences. Simple syntax.

Up next: A St. Petersburg extravaganza, beginning with two Gogol’s St. Petersburg stories, then Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. I must admit these works have been a bit of a shock to the system after Ivan D.

Happy New Year & Reading Highlights from 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 23:56:00 +0000

Happy new year! С Новым годом! I hope 2012 bring you plenty of fun and absorbing Russian books to read, no matter what language you read in. Before we finish with 2011, I thought I’d write up a quick list of books I particularly enjoyed during the year:

Favorite book. I can’t decide on just one favorite, so I’ll name two, listing them alphabetically by author surname: Mikhail Gigolashvili’s The Interpreter (previous post) and Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair (previous post). Both books felt especially exuberant, with lively voices and structures, and subject matter that’s difficult to summarize. I think this must have been my year for books of this type: I also loved Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog, which I read in Ross Benjamin’s German-to-English translation (post on my other blog).

Favorite newer release. I didn’t do so well with books released during late 2010 or 2011—an unusually high number of the year’s Big Book finalists were clunkers for me—but I did enjoy Iurii Buida’s Blue Blood (previous post) once I got past the first 50 pages and got used to Buida’s patterns. The book may be too quirky or collage-like (to borrow from Alexander Anichkin’s comment) for some readers but something (?) managed to win me over.

Favorite “what’s old is new” work. Andrei Platonov’s Juvenile Sea, sometimes Sea of Youth, (previous post) still rings in my mind… it’s probably those pumpkin sleeping pods. I think it’s safe to say that Platonov is my favorite writer who must be read slowly; I seem to read every paragraph at least twice. I love how Platonov arranges his words.

Favorite discovery. A few of Fazil’ Iskander’s Chik stories (previous post) and a novella (previous post) were enough to give me a new favorite writer whose stories I want to ration and read over time. I particularly love Iskander’s gentle humor and his ability to portray the everyday injustices of Soviet life.

Favorite work of nonfiction. I only read a few books of nonfiction this year but Frank Westerman’s Engineers of the Human Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia (previous post), translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, was my kind of book, thanks to its combination of socialist realism and irrigation in the Soviet Union.

Travel. Book-related travel was a treat, a big highlight of 2011: I met a lot of you at the London Book Fair, BookExpo America, and the American Literary Translators Association Conference. I hope to see and meet more of you in 2012, particularly given the market focus on Russia at BookExpo America—I’ve already been excited about BEA 2012 for over a year! I’m sure I’ll be writing more about BEA when details are available.

What’s next? This isn’t book news, but I’m also excited about 2012 because I’ll be teaching first-year Russian at Bowdoin College next semester. I particularly love teaching first-year courses so am looking forward to getting started. As for reading, I don’t make resolutions but I am planning on at least one geographically based book sequence, beginning with St. Petersburg: some of Gogol’s Petersburg stories, Bely’s Petersburg, and perhaps Bykov’s Ostromov. I’m already thinking that a Moscow sequence might be fun for the second half of the year. I still have a clump of Shklovsky books on the shelf, too, just waiting for a mini-marathon.

Finally, I want to thank all of you for your visits, comments, book recommendations, and e-mail messages. It’s always fun to hear from you! I wish everyone lots of enjoyable reading in 2012… Happy new year!

Disclosures: The usual. Previous posts that I have referenced in this post contain further disclosure information about individual books and relationships.

Image credit: Fireworks in Bratislava, New Year 2005, from Ondrejk, via Wikipedia.

Benigsen’s Rayad and Krzhizhanovsky’s Letter Killers

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 20:40:00 +0000

My last two book commentaries for the year—about Vsevolod Benigsen’s Раяд (Rayad) and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Клуб убийц букв (The Letter Killers Club)—feel all too typical of my reading in 2011, a year when I abandoned many books and finished others without particular enthusiasm. In this case, I finished both books but neither gave me quite the kick I might have hoped for…

Rayad, a novel about contemporary Moscow, borrows heavily from the detective genre: Benigsen begins with the murder of a man in a moviehouse then shows us an investigation carried out by a recent widower, Kostya. Kostya and his young daughter go to live in a clean, orderly, and slightly creepy all-Russian neighborhood in Moscow, where Kostya quickly meets Gremlin, the alleged perpetrator, a nationalist. Benigsen works in a series of faux historical letters, including one from V.I. Lenin himself, about Rayads, an invented nomadic tribe who once lived in Kostya’s new neighborhood. Of course corruption makes an appearance, too.

Rayad is competently composed and constructed, and it addresses timely sociocultural and sociopolitical issues, but I think Benigsen missed a chance to write a truly important book, a book that makes readers feel deeply uncomfortable. Though there’s a nasty scene on a train with Gremlin and his gang, it’s physical violence and we don’t know the victim. To my mind, the problem with Rayad is that Benigsen doesn’t go nearly far enough in exploring the psychology of nationalism in a way that would encourage readers to (re)examine their own beliefs.

Worse, Rayad’s characters and plot developments feel formulaic. Kostya’s family is half military and half intelligentsia, his new neighbor has problems because he’s not pure Russian, a neighborhood woman resembles Kostya’s dead wife, and so on. The term “Rayad” is particularly obvious because it sounds like an amalgam of the words for heaven and hell. By contrast, Benigsen’s ГенАцид (GenAcide) (previous post) is funnier, sharper, and more literary. Rayad reminded me of Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers, where Perrotta also failed this picky reader by backing away from an opportunity to write an important book; The Leftovers, too, lacked enough narrative tension and social spark to inspire introspection, rendering it mediocre “stuff.”

Nearly a century earlier, Krzhizhanovsky put literary tropes to use in The Letter Killers Club, a novella of sorts. Krzhizhanovsky frames five stories, setting them up by describing an apartment and the host of a club where members, each known by a monosyllabic nickname, recite stories from memory. I don’t want to spill many details but I’ll say that the leader, a writer, composed his books after having to sell all his books; he imagined his books and the letters on the pages, rearranging them to occupy emptiness. He says writers are “professional word tamers” (“профессиональные дрессировщики слов”). (The English phrase is from Joanne Turnbull’s translation, which you can look inside on Amazon.)

I think my biggest difficulty with The Letter Killers Club is that I, a bit like the narrator, who’s an invited guest at the meetings, was more interested in buttonholing club members for a chat than in listening to their stories. More frustrating, the first tale, a playlet with characters from Hamlet and the eternal question and implications of “to be or not to be,” interested me far more than the remaining four, despite the appearance of my beloved carnival themes and an interesting science fiction take on mind control. Some of the stories just felt too long.

I think the most intriguing aspect of The Letter Killers Club stems from the opening scene, where Hermann Ebbinghaus is referred to as “мнемолог,” a mnemologist. The story and my book’s endnotes also mention Ebbinghaus’s use of “бессмысленные слоги” (“nonsense syllables”) in his research; Krzhizhanovsky’s club’s host uses Ebbinghaus’s term to refer to club members’ nicknames. Ebbinghaus used nonsense syllables in his research to remove associations with real words.

Of course associations develop, both in memory research and in the story: storytellers occasionally even borrow fellow club members’ nicknames for their characters, just as they, like their leader, borrow and reshuffle letters, syllables, and motifs from world languages and literatures. All the club’s storytelling (well, most of, but I won’t go into that) is from memory, playing on mnemonics; I have to think archetypes must have been helpful devices, too. (Festival of the Ass, anyone?) The Letter Killers Club gave my addled brain lots to think about last week when I had a nasty cold: my dreamy, floaty head probably got me further than a clear head could have.

I still have hundreds more pages to try in my collection of Krzhizhanovsky stories and novellas; despite the disappointment of The Letter Killers Club, I’m looking forward to reading more. I have the feeling (or at least the hope!) Krzhizhanovsky may be the kind of writer whose work takes time and patience, that ideas may seep from story to story, eventually accumulating in a way that begins to form a world or worldview. Joanne Turnbull’s translation of The Letter Killers Club, with an introduction by Caryl Emerson, is a recent release from New York Review Books.

P.S. Here are links to some pieces, most with more enthusiastic opinions than mine, that contain far more details about Krzhizhanovsky and The Letter Killers Club. Just watch out for all those details: I think the unexpectedness of the novella is one of its real virtues, so I was glad I knew almost nothing about it when I read.

Daniel Kalder on The Millions

Joe Gallagher on Ploughshares

Matt McGregor on The Rumpus

Trevor on The Mookse and the Gripes

A Common Reader

Scott Esposito on The National

Up Next: Favorites from 2011. And Dmitrii Dobrodeev’s Большая svoboda Ивана Д. (Ivan D.’s Big Liberty). And then a reading extravaganza—inspired by peculiarities of Petersburg and some of my translation work—is on the way. Why, I thought, just reread Bely’s Petersburg? I’m planning to start with Gogol’s Petersburg tales (or a selection of said tales, I’m not sure), move on to Petersburg, and then finish with something contemporary, probably Dmitrii Bykov’s Ostromov.

Disclosures: The usual. I received a copy of Rayad at the London Book Fair from organizers of the Russia pavilion. Thank you! I know New York Review Books from discussions of translation at book fairs. One other thing: that Amazon link is my affiliate link.

Trip Notes: Literary Translator Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 21:25:00 +0000

It took me a few weeks to get caught up on my sleep and work (ouch!) after traveling to Kansas City for the American Literary Translators Association conference the week before Thanksgiving… here, at last, are a few conference highlights:

I don’t often write about films but want to be sure to recommend Vadim Jendreyko’s documentary (Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten) The Woman With the 5 Elephants to anyone interested in literary translation, Dostoevsky, and/or moral ambiguity. Jendreyko profiles Svetlana Geier, who left Ukraine for Germany during World War 2; the five elephants of the title are five of Dostoevsky’s long novels that Geier translated.

Jendreyko makes beautiful use of silence in the film, showing us Geier’s translation process—which includes dictating translations to a woman at a manual typewriter and, later, taking notes on the typewritten copy as she listens to comments and criticisms from a crustily endearing musician friend (see photo)—as well as her food shopping, cooking, and first trip to Ukraine in decades. Jendreyko’s film tells us that Geier’s father was a political prisoner and that Geier’s knowledge of German helped her leave the Soviet Union, but he doesn’t push her, at least on camera, to explain much about how she managed to go to Germany. Instead he cuts in scenes from a silent Crime and Punishment (Robert Wiene’s Raskolnikow, I believe), along with Geier’s comments on Dostoevsky and Raskol’nikov.

Though I’d dreaded the 9.30 p.m. screening time after a long day at the conference, The Woman With the 5 Elephants was so oddly suspenseful and puzzling that it kept me fully alert, awake, and even enthralled. I’m not sure what left the strongest impression on me—Geier’s occasional mischievous looks into the camera, uncertainty about her past, the silences, or Geier’s wonderfully old-fashioned translation techniques—but the film was well worth staying up to watch.

My personal highlights of the conference were reading from one of my works in progress, Konstantin Vaginov’s novella Бамбочада (Bambocciade) and reciting, from memory (eek!), Arsenii Tarkovskii’s brief poem “Портрет” (“Portrait”), in the original and in my own translation during the “Declamación” program. I’ve always thought of myself as a horrible memorizer but I can’t tell you how glad I am that Marian Schwartz urged me to take part. Declamacion was as fun as promised, and I particularly enjoyed hearing poems—e.g. Chinese arias—sung. I’m already thinking ahead to next year so I can prepare a poem that’s a little longer. There’s a lot to be said for memorizing a poem and reciting it in public.

A few other things to mention… Poet and translator Peter Golub gave me a copy of St. Petersburg Review (no. 3, 2009), a nicely produced thick journal of essays, fiction, poetry, and drama, with many pieces translated from Russian and Chinese… A few new releases from Russian-English translators: Marian’s translation of Andrei Gelasimov’s Жажда (Thirst) came out from Amazon Crossing last month… Psalms, Jim Kates’s chapbook of translations of psalms by Genrikh Sapgir, is out this December from Cold Hub Press… and Jamie Olson’s translation of Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak’s “Tale of How There Once Was a Fly Who Outlived the Others” (“Сказка о том, как жила-была последняя муха”) was published in the fall 2011 issue of Chtenia. Congratulations to all!

Bonus! The afore-mentioned St. Petersburg Review is one of the organizers of a poetry event on December 21 at 6 p.m. at the Cornelia Street Café in New York City. Host will be Alissa Heyman; poets Polina Barskova, Irina Mashinski, and Eugene Ostashevsky will read.

Up next: Vsevolod Benigsen’s Раяд (Rayad) and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Клуб убийц букв (The Letter Killers Club), then highlights of 2011.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Image credit: Site for Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten.

Andrei Bely Prize Award Winners & Some Links

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:39:00 +0000

I’m about a week late and a ruble short on this one but want to mention winners of the Andrei Bely prize. Nikolai Baitov won the prose award for Думай, что говоришь (Think When You Speak or maybe Think Before You Speak), a collection of short stories. The poetry award went to Andrei Poliakov’s Китайский десант (Parenthetical information edited: please see comments... I’ll call this Chinese Landing Force, though an online bookstore calls it Chinese Descent. This title is (of course!) complicated since десант is usually a military landing or the troops who make them. I’m equally uninformed about these terms in English and Russian so suggestions are welcome.). Information on other Bely awards is available here. Just one of my rubles would endow this prize: that’s the value of the entire fund.

Bonus! Baitov is also a poet; some of his poems are available online in Jim Kates’s translations (Cardinal Points) (Jacket).

I learned about another award winner just before posting: John Woodsworth and Arkadi Klioutchanski won the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work for their translation of Sofia Tolstaya’s My Life, published by the University of Ottawa Press. Woodsworth and Klioutchanski are both affiliated with the University of Ottawa. (press release) Thanks to the American Literary Translators Association for mentioning the award on Facebook.

I’ve run across a wealth of articles about Russian literature lately. Here are links to a few:

I always enjoy reading Russian Dinosaur’s blog but the two most recent posts were particularly engaging: the Dinosaur’s thoughts about The Collaborators, John Hodge’s new play about Mikhail Bulgakov, and a wonderful piece on a talk that Oliver Ready gave about translation. Oliver offered examples from Crime and Punishment, which he is translating, and the Dinosaur included one of the sentences, in the original and four translations. The blog called XIX век then followed with two related posts (here) and (here). XIX век is, by the way, written in English.

Last week Stephen Dodson, perhaps better known as Languagehat, opened the “A Year in Reading” series for The Millions with a post about Life and Fate. Life and Fate received more attention this week, through a review by Adam Kirsch on The New Republic’s site; the piece first appeared in Tablet. Also: The Quarterly Conversation published Malcolm Forbes’s essay about Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (in David McDuff’s translation); I still need to print this piece out so I can read it properly. (I also need to push Petersburg forward on my bookshelf… I’ve been intending to reread it for years.) Finally, Scott Esposito’s review of Victor Pelevin’s The Hall of Singing Caryatids, translated by Andrew Bromfield and recently released by New Directions, appeared on The National’s site.

Up Next: Trip notes about the American Literary Translators Association conference in Kansas City and Vsevolod Benigsen’s Раяд (Rayad), a novel about nationalism that feels a little formulaic... A year-end post with 2011 favorites is also on the schedule, and I’m planning to compile a list of new and upcoming translations. The latter will likely coincide with a presentation I’ll be giving at the Scarborough Public Library in late January—I’m excited to talk about some of the new titles at my town library!

It’s been an extraordinarily hectic fall—in lots of very, very good ways—but things seem to be settling back into a real routine, which means I’m getting back to my usual reading and writing habits. Thank goodness!

Disclosures: The usual.

Booker of the Decade Goes to Chudakov

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 01:30:00 +0000

The winner of the Russian Booker of the Decade was announced today: Aleksandr Chudakov won, posthumously, for Ложится мгла на старые ступени... (beginning) (end) (A Gloom Is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps). Время/Vremia, a Russian publisher, wrote on Facebook today that they are preparing the book for publication. The novel was a Booker finalist in 2001.

Rather than attempting to summarize yet another book I haven’t read, I’ll just say that the beginning of the book has been translated, by Timothy D. Sergay, who received a PEN Translation Fund grant and a National Endowment for the Arts grant to support his work. Chapter 1 is available (here) on Words Without Borders and Chapter 2 is online (here) on the PEN American Center site.

It’s been quite a week (a good one!) so I haven’t had much time to look at reactions to the award but I’ll add some links and thoughts over the weekend.

Up next: American Literary Translator Association conference notes and (I think) the Andrei Bely prize winners.

The Jury Speaks: 2011 Big Book Award Winners

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:46:00 +0000

I’d like to thank the 2011 Big Book jury for making it easy for me to write this post. This year’s Big Book readers and jury chose the same book—Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник (Letter-Book) (previous post)—as their big winner. The jury gave second prize to Vladimir Sorokin’s Метель (The Blizzard) (previous post), and Dmitrii Bykov’s Остромов, или Ученик чародея (Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice) took third.

After enjoying Fazil Iskander’s stories about a boy called Chik (previous post), I was happy to see that Iskander won this year’s special award “за честь и достоинство” (“for honor and merit/virtue”). A big, thick collection of Iskander’s stories about Sandro of Chegem is on my shelf—not far from Bykov’s big, thick novel about Ostromov—waiting for that winter moment when I desperately need a long book. (I’m glad to have options: I’ve recently been resisting a fifth reading of War and Peace…)

Big Book also recognized Peter Mayer, of Overlook Press and Duckworth, for his contributions to literature. Overlook’s list of fiction translated from Russian over the last several years includes Liudmila Ulitskaya’s Daniel Stein, Interpreter (tr. Arch Tait), Olga Slavnikova’s 2017 (tr. Marian Schwartz), Today I Wrote Nothing, a collection by Daniil Kharms (tr. Matvei Yankelevich), and several novels by Max Frei (tr. Polly Gannon, Ast A. Moore). Nonfiction titles include Frank Westerman’s Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia (tr. Sam Garrett), which I enjoyed very much (previous post). Overlook has owned the Ardis list since 2002.

For more:

Up Next: Booker of the Decade, trip notes from the recent American Literary Translators Association conference, and maybe something about Aleksei Varlamov’s Купол (The Cupola or The Dome), though I’m finding the book rather inert, largely because of the dearth of dialogue.

Disclaimers: The usual. I should note that I always enjoy speaking with Peter Mayer and his Overlook colleagues at events during and around book fairs.

Big Book Readers’ Choices & Tolstoy Event in NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 01:29:00 +0000

Just a quick post for today, to let you know that three books were chosen as reader favorites as part of the Big Book Prize program: Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник (Letter-Book) (previous post), Dmitrii Bykov’s Остромов, или Ученик чародея (Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice), and Iurii Buida’s Синяя кровь (Blue Blood) (previous post). Readers voted online. I, unfortunately, forgot to vote.

I probably would have voted for Blue Blood, which I enjoyed very much despite a rough start. None of the books felt like sure winners or enduring favorites to me, though I certainly understand the appeal of Letter-Book… which I also enjoyed very much despite a rough start. I’m going to keep trying Bykov’s Ostromov in hopes of catching it when I’m in the right mood: it looks good but I think it’s asking to wait until the depths of winter.

Over all, despite some decent books, this year’s shortlist didn’t give me big favorites like last year’s, where I loved both Senchin’s The Yeltyshevs (previous post) and Gigolashvili’s The Devil’s Wheel (previous post). I thought two other, very different books – Pavlov’s dark Asystole (previous post) and Zaionchkovskii’s almost-light Happiness Is Possible (previous post) – were also very good for very different reasons. I’m curious to see which book wins the jury prizes next week particularly since several – those by Bykov, Slavnikova, and Sorokin – have already won major awards.

And a quick note on an event in New York City: on Friday, December 2, 2011, The Coffin Factory and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will host a reading and discussion of Rosamund Bartlett’s Tolstoy: A Russian Life at 192 Books, 190 10^th Avenue. The book, which was released in early November, is a 560-page biography of Lev Tolstoy. The event, scheduled for 7-8:30 p.m., has a listing on Facebook here.

Up Next: Trip report from the American Literary Translators Association conference, winners of the Big Book jury prize and the Booker of the Decade, and, eventually, Veniamin Kaverin’s Открытая книга (Whether I think this is The Open Book or An Open Book remains an open question…).

Disclaimers: The usual. And of course I still want to translate Senchin’s Yeltyshevs…

At the Heart of Buida’s Blue Blood

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 21:28:00 +0000

Iurii Buida’s latest novel, Синяя кровь (Blue Blood), is so filled with literary allusions, peculiar characters, and odd happenings that the book took some getting used to: on the first page, for example, a fly-catching elderly actress with the not-so-common name Ida gets up when the clock rings three in Africa. All this in a Russian town called Chudov, a name a little longer than чудо (miracle or wonder) and a little shorter than чудовище (monster). I’m glad the book and I came to terms after about 50 pages. Once I settled into Blue Blood, it became, by far, my favorite among this year’s Big Book Award finalists (previous post). I’ve read (or attempted to read) all the books on the list, though have yet to give Dmitrii Bykov’s Остромов, или Ученик чародея (Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice) the real college try.

Africa, it turns out, is the name of the building where Ida lives: it was formerly the bordello known as Тело и дело—two rhyming words that mean body and deed—where Ida’s mother worked. Ida’s nephew, whom she calls Friday, narrates the book, telling stories about Ida, whom Buida based on actress Valentina Karavaeva. Meaning Blue Blood is a fictionalized, quirkily embroidered biography of Karavaeva filtered through a (fictional?) character’s childhood and adult observations. The nickname Friday, by the way, is just one piece of a series of references to Robinson Crusoe; Kirill Glikman’s review on OpenSpace.ru focuses on that element of Blue Blood.

“Actress” sounds glamorous but Ida’s life is filled with pain: a brief marriage to an Englishman, an accident that ruins her film career by making her face look like a broken plate, the Stalinist repression, and the sudden appearance of a former husband’s wife and child. As Ida likes to say, “От счастья толстеют.” – “Happiness makes you fat.” She eats little and smokes 10 cigarettes a day, something memorable because of Friday’s habit of repeating lists of objects important to characters. Here, Glikman recognizes something from Robinson Crusoe (which I haven’t read) but Friday’s tic reminded me of repetition in fairy tales, particularly given the proximity of characters with names like Baba Zha. Blue Blood also contains dark, Soviet-era transformations of fairy tale elements identified by Vladimir Propp. Among them: Ida leaves home, returns home, handles numerous difficult tasks, and marries. There is villainy on many levels, and there is even a kiss (from a general, no less) worthy of the one that awoke Sleeping Beauty.

Buida also works in references to higher literature. Dostoevsky stood out for me, perhaps in part because I’ve been reading Netochka Nezvanova: one night I read from both books, and a chapter in each ended with a cliffhanger involving fainting. Beyond that, Buida offers a mention of people униженные и оскорбленные (often translated as humiliated and insulted), a child called Grushen’ka, and a character likened to a Dostoevskian pleasure-seeker. Beyond Dostoevsky, Ida plays Nina Zarechnaia in Chekhov’s Seagull. The name Zarechnaia (on the other side of the river), certainly suits Ida, who is clearly her own person, her own myth. One more: Ida recites Romeo and Juliet for hospital patients, improvising as needed, thus emphasizing characters’ storytelling powers as she tells of tragedy and suffering, something she says benefits those who come after us… I read this in a broad context—the family of all humanity—since Ida is childless and Buida populates his novel with orphans and broken families.

The metaphor of blue blood also flows through the novel: in short, Ida’s actress friend Serafima tells her red blood is hot and makes the head spin with ideas, but cooler blue blood is a more controlled, self-possessed mastery, “Страшный Суд художника над самим собой”—an artist’s self-imposed Judgment Day—something Serafima says is both a gift and a curse. It can freeze.

Buida’s novel is also a gift and a curse, though it’s my favorite kind of literary curse, a book that contains so much to consider, feel, and cross-reference that it doesn’t let me go or lend itself to quick analysis. The long list of big topics I’ve left uncovered includes death (e.g. Ida’s work with girls who release doves at funerals), purpose in life, a touch of something gothic, Chudov’s “Pavlov’s Dog” café, nightmares, and acting, which has subtopics like mimesis and a list of Ida’s various names and roles. Ida’s roles include parts she plays in her personal home movie archive as well as “Ida,” a name she selects for herself as a child instead of going through life as Tanya.

Level for non-native readers of Russian: 3.0/5.0 or so, moderately difficult. I found the book’s oddities more challenging than its language.

Up next: Dostoevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova and Kaverin’s Открытая книга (The Open Book or maybe An Open Book, I’m still deciding…), which has been a perfect (relatively) light book to take slowly at a time when I’ve been distracted by a confluence of work deadlines, a cold, and preparation for this week’s American Literary Translators Association conference. I may write about that, too, we’ll see.

NOSE Award Finalists for Winter 2011-2012

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:07:00 +0000

I guess it really is award season: yesterday the Andrei Bely and Booker of the Decade short lists came out, today it’s NOSE. The NOSE Literary Prize people from the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation announced their list today at the Krasnoyarsk Book Culture Fair. NOSE prizes will be awarded in late January 2012 during a talk show. Here’s the short list in Russian alphabetical order:

Andrei Astvatsaturov — Скунскамера (Skunkamera).
Nikolai Baitov — Думай, что говоришь (Think When You Speak). Short stories (41 in 320 pages) from a poet.
Igor’ Vishnevetskii — Ленинград (Leningrad), a novella set in Leningrad during World War 2 that Vishnevetskii says is a postscript of sorts to Andrei Belyi’s Petersburg because he imagined Belyi’s characters in his own book. For more: Svobodanews.ru interview with Vishnevetskii here.
Dmitrii Danilov — Горизонтальное положение (Horizontal Position). (previous post) The OpenSpace.ru news item about the short list notes that its Krasnoyarsk correspondent says this book was added to the list by "experts."
Nikolai Kononov: Фланёр (The Flâneur), a novel set in the 1930s and 1940s. (OpenSpace.ru review)
Aleksandr Markin: Дневник 2006–2011 (Diary 2006-2011), Live Journal posts from Russia’s first LJ blogger. Comments on Ozon.ru note Markin’s interest in German literature and European architecture.
Viktor Pelevin: Ананасная вода для прекрасной дамы (Pineapple Water for a Beautiful Lady), a bestselling story collection.
Maria Rybakova: Гнедич (Gnedich), a novel in verse about Russian poet Nikolai Gnedich, the first Russian translator of The Iliad. Rybakova is also a poet. Excerpt
Mikhail Shishkin: Письмовник (Letter-Book). (previous post)
Gleb Shul’piakov: Фес (Fes or Fez, as you prefer), a novel. The publisher’s description says Fes is about a man who brings his wife to the maternity hospital then, when left to his own devices, ends up in a basement in an unidentified eastern city… sounds like another case of warped reality. [Update on January 31, 2012: Oops! There was a mistake in the shortlist I used to compile this post... Fez was initially on the list, then removed.]
Irina Iasina: История болезни (Case History) appears to be a memoir about having multiple sclerosis.

News Bonus: Emanuel Carrère’s Limonov, a French-language book about Eduard Limonov, won Le prix Renaudot; it sounds like it straddles genre lines for biography and novel. Here are two news items: Russian and French (scroll down a bit). The Wikipedia entry on Carrère notes that he is the son of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, a historian who has written extensively about Russia and the Soviet Union. I still have her Decline of an Empire. The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt on my history/poli sci shelf.

Up Next: Iurii Buida’s Синяя кровь (Blue Blood) then Dostoevsky’s Неточка Незванова (Netochka Nezvanova).

Booker of the Decade & Bely 2011 Short Lists

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 02:11:00 +0000

Today was a big day for Russian book award short lists… Here are two quick bleary-eyed, late-evening lists [with a few next-morning edits]:

First, the Russian Booker of the Decade, for which a huge panel of past judges chose five books out of the 60 that were shortlisted over the past 10 years. The winner will be announced on December 1. The five finalists, in Russian alphabetical order, are:

Oleg Pavlov – Карагандинские девятины, или Повесть последних дней (A Ninth-Day Wake/Party at Karaganda or A Story of Recent Days/Commemoration in Karaganda). This is the third book in the trilogy that begins with Казенная сказка (A Barracks Tale), which I wrote about here. Pavlov’s novel is the only book on the list that has won a Booker.
Zakhar Prilepin – Санькя (San’kya), which I wrote about here. I have a strong preference for Prilepin’s Грех, (Sin) (previous post), which won the SuperNatsBest earlier this year, but San’kya has often been cited for its political significance.
Roman Senchin – Елтышевы (1) (2) (The Yeltyshevs) (previous post), one of my favorite books of recent years [one I’d like to translate], a novel that was short-listed for everything but hasn’t won an award.
Liudmila Ulitskaya – Даниэль Штайн, переводчик (Daniel Stein, Translator) won the Big Book award a few years ago. I enjoyed the book very much when I read it several years ago (previous post). Daniel Stein came out in translation, from Overlook Press, earlier this year.
Aleksandr Chudakov – Ложится мгла на старые ступени... (beginning) (end) (A Gloom Is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps), a complete mystery to me. Words Without Borders describes the book as a “memoiristic novel” and says Chudakov wrote “widely admired memoirs of such leading Russian literary scholars as Viktor Shklovsky, Viktor Vinogradov, and Lidia Ginzburg,” plus five books and a couple hundred articles.

Now for the Andrei Bely prize short list, for which winners will be announced on December 2… fortunately there is overlap with the NOSE long list, so I can copy and paste a few of these.

Nikolai Baitov – Думай, что говоришь (Think When You Speak). Short stories (41 in 320 pages) from a poet.
Igor Golubentsev – Точка Цзе (Not sure… The Tsze Spot, The Tsze Point, Sharpening Tsze? [see first comment, from languagehat]), apparently a collection of very short stories.
Vladimir Mikhailov – Русский садизм (Russian Sadism). ?
Aleksandr Markin –Дневник. 2006-2011 (Diary 2006-2011), Live Journal posts from Russia’s first LJ blogger, who has interests in German literature and European architecture.
Denis Osokin – Овсянки (Yellowhammers), a novella that has already been made into a film known in English as Silent Souls.
Pavel Pepperstein – Пражская ночь (Prague Night). I know more (but still not much!) about Pepperstein as a conceptualist artist and founder of “Inspection ‘Medical Hermeneutics’” than as a writer. A friend did mention enjoying Prague Night, though.
Мария Рыбакова -- Гнедич (Gnedich), a novel in verse about Russian poet Nikolai Gnedich, the first Russian translator of The Iliad. Rybakova is also a poet. Excerpt

The Andrei Bely award also recognizes other types of writing, including poetry and humanitarian research. I’m especially excited about the poetry category this time – the nominees are Polina Barskova, Alla Gorbunova, Vladimir Ermolaev, Vasilii Lomakin, Andrei Poliakov, Aleksei Porvin, and Ilya Rissenberg – because I met Polina Barskova at a wonderful poetry translation conference here in Maine last weekend. The title poem from her nominated collection, Сообщения Ариэля (Ariel’s Message), is available in translation here on Cardinal Points, and OpenSpace.ru has a video of Polina reading another poem (“Соучастие” (scroll down for text)). Even if you don’t understand Russian, it’s worth clicking through just to hear Polina’s voice and watch her expressions.

P.S. November 9, 2011: Melville House has a nice post on Polina Barskova that mentions her collections that have been translated into English plus some colorful background on the Bely Prize.

Up next: Iurii Buida’s Синяя кровь (Blue Blood).

Disclosures: The usual. I know Overlook Press from meetings in and around BookExpo America. And I still hope someone will decide they want to publish The Yeltyshevs!

M/М: Makanin, Mandel’shtam, and Co.

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 21:59:00 +0000

M turned out to be an unexpectedly prolific letter for favorite writers: I have one fiction writer and two poets to list, plus two literary helpers…

I’ve read quite a few books and stories by Vladimir Makanin and found more than enough to consider him a favorite. The very first Makanin line that I read, the beginning of the story “Сюр в Пролетарском районе”(“Surrealism in a Proletarian District”), got me off to a great start: “Человека ловила огромная рука.” (“A huge hand was trying to catch a man.”) (I used the translation in 50 Writers: An Anthology of 20^th Century Russian Short Stories.) The sentence fit my mood and the story caught me, too; I went on to read and love Makanin’s novellas Лаз (Escape Hatch) and Долог наш путь (The Long Road Ahead) (previous post).

Later, Андеграунд, или герой нашего времени (Underground or A Hero of Our Time) (previous post) took a couple hundred pages to win me over with its portrayal of a superfluous man for the perestroika era but I ended up admiring the book. Not everything from Makanin has worked for me, though: I didn’t like the Big Book winner Асан (Asan) (previous post) much at all, the Russian Booker-winning Стол, покрытый сукном и с графином посередине (Baize-Covered Table with Decanter) didn’t grab me, and I couldn’t finish Испуг (Fear), which felt like a rehashing of Underground. Despite that, I look forward to reading more of Makanin, especially his early, medium-length stories. A number of Makanin’s works are available in translation.

More M writers: I very much enjoyed Afanasii Mamedov’s Фрау Шрам (Frau Scar) (previous post) and want to read more of his writing, and I’d like to explore Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Iurii Mamleev more, too… I’ve read only small bits of both and would be happy for recommendations.

In poetry, I’ve always enjoyed Osip Mandel’shtam, whose acmeist poetry was a big part of my graduate coursework. “Адмиралтейство” (“The Admiralty”) is a sentimental favorite, probably partly because it’s one of the first Mandel’shtam poems I read, partly because the Admiralty was a landmark for me when I spent a summer in Leningrad. Another: “Волк” (“Wolf”), which I analyzed a few years ago with a friend. I’ve also enjoyed reading Vladimir Maiakovskii, though I think I find him more memorable as a Futurist figure than as a writer.

As for the literary helpers: D. S. Mirsky’s A History of Russian Literature has been with me since the early ‘80s, when I first started reading Russian literature in Russian. My little paperback is water-stained, falling apart, and dusty-smelling. But it’s a classic on the classics, and I still use it. I should also mention Gary Saul Morson, who taught War and Peace to me twice, first in an undergraduate course on history and literature that also covered Fathers and Sons and Notes from the Underground, then in a graduate course on War and Peace. I didn’t realize then how much he’d taught me about reading, writing, literary criticism, and carnival. One day (one year?) I will read all of his Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, in order, instead of picking up the book and reading random chunks, à la Pierre Bezukhov.

Up next: Iurii Buida’s Синяя кровь (Blue Blood), which I’ve been enjoying after a rough start with too many quirky names, then Dostoevsky’s Неточка Незванова (Netochka Nezvanova), which I’m reading as part of my preparation for speaking on a panel—with Marian Schwartz and Jamie Olson—at the American Literary Translators Association conference next month.

Image credit: Photo of Vladimir Makanin from Rodrigo Fernandez, via Wikipedia

Makanin on Amazon

Mandel'shtam on Amazon

A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900 (an update I ought to buy [so the book doesn't make me sneeze]!)

Gary Saul Morson on Amazon

50 Writers: An Anthology of 20th Century Russian Short Stories (Cultural Syllabus)

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Four Years with The Bookshelf

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 22:45:00 +0000

The cupcake is back, marking the end of my fourth year writing Lizok’s Bookshelf. With four years of blogging in the books (as they say) it was fun to take my annual look at a few trends on the blog, to see where visitors live and what brought them here. A few things have changed but there’s one constant: it’s always a pleasure to thank you, the readers who come here, for your visits and for the many recommendations, ideas, and pieces of advice you’ve offered, in blog comments, by e-mail, and in person.

I seem to say this every year but I’ll say it again: when I contemplated starting the blog four years ago, I never, ever would or could have thought that I would meet so many new friends and colleagues through The Bookshelf! It’s great to know there’s so much interest in Russian fiction.

Here are a few of my annual report statistics:

Geography. The countries with the most visitors never seem to change: United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Canada, and Italy are still the top five countries. The top city has shifted, though, with New York and Moscow edging out London. I should point out, however, that Londoners take longer visits than New Yorkers or Muscovites. The next three cities in the top ten are Perm’, Milwaukee, and Oxford. There was a slight decrease in visits during summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

Popular Posts. The most popular post of the fiscal year was also a change: The Top 10 Fiction Hits of Russian Literature knocked the “Overcoat” post out of the top spot for the first time. Posts about Baldaev’s Drawings from the Gulag and Pushkin’s Belkin Tales were, respectively, the third and fourth most popular for the year.

Common and Odd Search Terms. Common terms first: Variations on Elena Chizhova’s name continue to come up often, and the Russian Booker Prize is also a draw. Other popular combinations for searches included Oleg Pavlov’s Asystole, the afore-mentioned Drawings from the Gulag, and Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line. Several translators’ names come up regularly, too, and many readers come looking for information on award winners beyond the Booker.

This fall brought fewer odd searches than previous years but here are a few:

Lizok’s Bookstore: This one, which came up quite a few times, makes me happy, if only because I sometimes wish I did own a bookstore. Other visitors continue to come to the blog looking for bookshelves of various types.
I’m happy: Happy people visited from 10 cities, two in India, and eight others scattered all over the rest of the world. Numerous variations—e.g. happy face—popped up, too. The happy crowd gets funneled to a post about Oleg Zaionchkovskii’s Happiness Is Possible.
First story of potatoes: I’m not sure what this person was looking for, but s/he was directed to a post about Oleg Pavlov’s Barracks Tale. Another book involving potatoes (fried, my favorite) is Dina Kalinovksaia’s Oh, Shabbat!, which I enjoyed very much, though I have yet to attempt making gefilte fish.

That’s it for this year’s annual report. Again, a big thank you—огромное спасибо—to all of you who visit The Bookshelf. I look forward to another year of reading, discussion, and, I hope, opportunities to meet more of you! Happy reading! Maybe next year I’ll actually bake some cupcakes.

Up Next: I’m not sure… Mikhail Lipskerov’s Белая горячка. Delirium Tremens hasn’t been holding my interest very consistently: it has some funny moments but feels too much like a rehashing of themes from other books about drinking and rough lives, like Moscow to the End of the Line and a couple of Vladimir Makanin’s books. I may just move on to Iurii Buida’s Синяя кровь (Blue Blood).

Cupcake photo: nazreth, via stock.xchng.

Totally: Novellas by Chukovskaya and Iskander

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:21:00 +0000

I first read Lydia Chukovskaya’s Софья Петровна (Sofia Petrovna) in the early ‘90s, when I lived in Moscow: it was one of six pieces in a collection called Трудные повести (Difficult Novellas) that also included Andrei Platonov’s Котлован (The Foundation Pit). My reading skills weren’t ready for Platonov then but I could read and appreciate Sofia Petrovna quickly, easily, without a dictionary. The novella was even more satisfying because I could tell Chukovskaya’s direct, unembellished language was the perfect medium for a story about a Leningrad widow whose son Kolya, an engineer, is arrested in the 1930s.

I appreciated Sofia Petrovna even more this time around, watching Chukovskaya unwind the story of Sofia Petrovna, a loyal Soviet citizen who becomes more and more unhinged trying to handle difficulties at work and the cruelly impossible task of finding her son. Chukovskaya experienced similar humiliations—she wrote the novella during November 1939-February 1940, after the arrest of her husband, which makes it even more remarkable—and demonstrates the effects of totalitarianism with painfully striking precision.

I’m thinking of totalitarianism in the second definition in my Webster’s New [sic: it’s dated 1981] Collegiate Dictionary—“the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an absolute state authority”—more than the first definition’s “centralized control by an autocratic authority” that creates the political concept. Chukovskaya’s novella is less about the system itself than its effects on the thinking and actions of regular people, represented by a circle of family and friends anchored by Sofia Petrovna. The book draws the reader into her psyche as Soviet life wears her down.

We hear Sofia Petrovna’s doubts about Kolya’s activity and friendships, experience her pain when her communal apartment neighbors say nasty things, and feel her deflation when she has brief audiences with government officials after waiting for hours, even days. As the novella continues and we witness her evolution from a happy, optimistic publishing house administrator to a recluse who barely eats, it’s not difficult to understand her confusion, her delusions, or her fears of everybody.

After Chukovskaya’s book I picked up a collection by Fazil’ Iskander and chose Сумрачной юности свет (The Light of Murky Youth) for one reason: at 75 pages, it was the longest piece in the book. I didn’t know the story was about an Abkhaz man, Zaur, whose father was shot during the Stalinist terror. Most of the story takes place when Zaur is an adult—there are mentions of Khrushchev—and the most vivid aspect of the story for me, perhaps because of my lingering thoughts on Sofia Petrovna, was the uneasy balance of private and public in Zaur’s life. That made the story feel like a later generation’s update on totalitarianism.

Iskander gives Zaur a childhood with public Stalin portraits and an adulthood that values privacy and individuality, whether he’s writing to the Central Committee about the need for more private farming or trying to find a place to be alone with his girlfriend. Though Iskander deftly blends believable characters with lots of telling episodes about required volunteer work, sneaking into forbidden places, police behavior, family pressures, and politics, the story felt a little lumpy to me. But that’s a minor complaint, what with the strong pull of the conflict between control and privacy (always a favorite), and Iskander’s ability to, like Chukovskaya, create vivid scenes, portraits, and stories out of simple words and complex human situations.

Level for Non-Native Readers of Russian: Though I think the language in Sofia Petrovna is easier than the language in The Light of Murky Youth, I’d recommend both to readers looking for relatively easy novellas.

Up Next: Perhaps Mikhail Lipskerov’s Белая горячка. Delirium Tremens, which I began reading today at the beach. If I don’t like the book as reading material it may still have an honored place in my life and beach bag: it’s a paperback of the perfect size and thickness for killing the stinging beach flies that love to hover around my ankles.

Fazil Iskander on Amazon
Sofia Petrovna on Amazon

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2011 Yasnaya Polyana Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 23:37:00 +0000

Winners of the Yasnaya Polyana Awards were announced today. Fazil’ Iskander received the “Contemporary Classic” prize for his three-volume Сандро из Чегема (Sandro of Chegem). Sandro of Chegem was a popular book among NOS-1973’s online voters earlier this year. Perhaps this is the sign I need to finally buy and read Sandro after enjoying some of Iskander’s Chik stories earlier this year (previous post).

Elena Katishonok won the “XXI Century” prize for Жили-были старик со старухой (Once There Lived an Old Man and His Wife) (excerpt); Katishonok’s novel was a 2009 Russian Booker finalist.

At least some of Sandro of Chegem is available in translation, as are Iskander’s Chik stories. A description on Amazon.com says Katishonok’s book is a family saga about Russian Orthodox Old Believers set in the first half of the twentieth century.

Fazil' Iskander on Amazon

Жили-были старик со старухой on Amazon

(I am an Amazon associate and receive a small percentage of purchases that readers make after clicking through my links.)

The Universal Solvent: Kuznetsov’s The Circle Dance of Water

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 23:51:00 +0000

I felt like I should cue up Sister Sledge singing “We Are Family” (here’s the Oprah version) when I finished Sergei Kuznetsov’s Хоровод воды (The Circle Dance of Water): Kuznetsov’s novel is a family saga, an ode to family ties and history that examines birth, aging, flaws, and fear of death. Circle Dance is a 2011 Big Book prize finalist, and Kuznetsov’s readable tale of multiple generations in an extended family is big indeed, both in size, at 600 pages, and century-long scope, with family members who include a female sniper in World War 2, an NKVD agent, and an alcoholic artist. Thank goodness the book had a family tree.

Though I think The Circle Dance of Water is probably the most enjoyable of the seven Big Book finalists I’ve attempted so far this year, I also think it’s deeply flawed. Kuznetsov’s water theme, for example, expands to kitschy tidal wave proportions by the end of the book, thanks to an overdose of, yes, mysticism. In the beginning, though, the water theme flows smoothly through the lives of three main characters living in 21^st-century Moscow. Nikita is a businessman with a custom aquarium business who is having an affair and a mid-life crisis but loves his depressed wife. Anya (née Elvira) is a shoe saleswoman and single mother who loves to swim. And Moreukhov is a formerly fashionable artist who goes on benders drinking alcoholic liquids.

I think Kuznetsov is at his best observing the lives of his contemporary characters. Nikita, for example, remembers having no money, when buying Danone yogurt made everybody happy. Now it’s caviar and Paris. In another scene, Dasha, Nikita’s much-younger mistress, looks at Nikita through the aquarium he built for her to decorate the apartment he rents for her. Nikita, with double chin and circles under his eyes, looks like a fish. And though I think Kuznetsov makes too much of Moreukhov’s obsession with movies, his choice of genre for his life, film noir, is absolutely fitting, even touching. With his heavy drinking, Moreukhov is a literary descendent of drinkers like Venedikt Erofeev’s Venya in Москва-Петушки (Moscow to the End of the Line) and Vladimir Makanin’s Petrovich in Андеграунд (Underground) (previous post), among others.

As an artist and storyteller who values ancestry and the past, Moreukhov, who also happens to be Nikita’s half-brother thanks to an extra-marital relationship, represents artistic representation and license. To Moreukhov, film conveys the feel of other times, blending art and life… making it a logical next step for Moreukhov to generate stories about various generations of family members. Moreukhov is only one of Kuznetsov’s narrators, and Kuznetsov sometimes hands storytelling duty from one character to another on quick notice. This is far less confusing than it probably sounds, particularly if you’re warned. Kuznetsov also connects individual chapters, characters, and eras with common objects or gestures, such as entwined hands.

Kuznetsov works lots, lots more into The Circle Dance of Water: creatures from beyond, orphaned characters, single mothers, religion, fears of aging and commitment and death and water, reincarnation, bodily fluids, literary references, and so on and so forth. Kuznetsov handles lots of this material with considerable grace, energy, and emotion, so I was very disappointed--and almost a little shocked--to find that he ties everything up neatly, first with a chapter of new agey sacrifices, then with an epilogue that includes a chapter called “Хеппи-энд” (“Happy Ending”). It is the 107th of 108 chapters, apparently referencing the number of defilements in Buddhism. (I’m glad literary agency Goumen & Smirnova posted a brief blurb from Echo of Moscow that mentions 108 and the Buddhist connection…)

Though I agree with Echo’s assessment that the book is more “a history of human passions” than a story of individual characters, I thought Kuznetsov’s water-based methods evolved to be too obvious, too programmed, even too superfluous to create a graceful transition from individual characters to universal passions and values. I wholeheartedly agree with the blogger known as Заметил просто that (I’ll paraphrase) the book would have left a better impression if I/we hadn’t read it to the very end. Which is too bad: trusting us, the readers, more and leaving some of the mysticism and the water to the imagination might have transformed the book—which I looked forward to reading and found entertaining—into something far more moving and satisfying.

Up Next: Not sure… I started Sergei Soloukh’s Игра в ящик (The Box Game) yesterday and am not enjoying his writing, which has the consistency of yeast bread that never rose. I visited the Big Book page on imhonet.ru to see what others thought and wasn’t surprised to find that both comments about The Box Game used the word жуткий (terrible, dreadful) to describe Soloukh’s writing.

Disclosures: Just the usual.

2011 NOSE Long List

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 21:37:00 +0000

It’s been a long time since I’ve methodically gone through an entire long or short list for an award, adding links and descriptions… so here you go: the entire 25-member 2011 НОС/NOSE award long list, with a few notes, including links to previous posts about the four books I’ve read. As usual, I’m sure some of the title translations are awful due to lack of context. The NOSE award is a program of the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund.

I’m also sure more summaries, excerpts, and full texts are floating around in the Runet, but this warm fall day keeps calling me away from my computer! Though a few books sound interesting, I can’t say I found anything new on the list that I feel compelled to seek out right away, particularly since there seem to be a lot of short story collections and nonfiction books on the list. Marina Palei, whom I’ve been meaning to read for some time, is probably at the top of my list.

1. Andrei Astvatsaturov: Скунскамера (Skunskamera), a book that’s a veteran of long and short lists.

2. Karine Arutiunova: Пепел красной коровы (Ash from the Red Cow), a collection of very short stories.

3. Marina Akhmedova: Дневник смертницы. Хадижа (Diary of a Death Girl. Khadizha. [a key title word can mean a prisoner condemned to death or a suicide bomber]), a novel about a Dagestani girl that Akhmedova based on stories of real girls in the Northern Caucasus.

4. Nikolai Baitov: Думай, что говоришь (Think When You Speak). Short stories (41 in 320 pages) from a poet.

5. Il’ia Boiashov: Каменная баба (The Stone Woman) (previous post)

6. Iana Vagner: Вонгозеро (Vongozero), a debut novel about a nasty flu; the book grew out of Live Journal posts.

7. Igor’ Vishnevetskii: Ленинград (Leningrad), a novella set in Leningrad during World War 2 that Vishnevetskii says is a postscript of sorts to Andrei Belyi’s Petersburg because he imagined Belyi’s characters in his own book. For more: Svobodanews.ru interview with Vishnevetskii here.

8. Natal’ia Galkina: Табернакль (Tabernacle)

9. Dj Stalingrad: Исход (could be Exodus or something like The Outcome), apparently about leftwing skinheads.

10. Dmitrii Danilov: Горизонтальное положение (Horizontal Position) (previous post)

11. Nikolai Kononov: Фланёр (The Flâneur), a novel set in the 1930s and 1940s. (OpenSpace.ru review)

12. Aleksandr Markin: Дневник 2006–2011 (Diary 2006-2011), Live Journal posts from Russia’s first LJ blogger. (This seems to be a common thread this year…) Comments on Ozon.ru note Markin’s interest in German literature and European architecture.

13. Aleksei Nikitin: Истеми (İstemi), a novel about bored students who create a geopolitical game and get in trouble. (The description on the Ad Marginem site is much more complicated.) Risk, anyone?

14. Marina Palei: Дань саламандре (beginning end) (Tribute [the monetary kind] for the Salamander) was also long-listed for the National Bestseller award.

15. Viktor Pelevin: Ананасная вода для прекрасной дамы (Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady), a bestselling story collection.

16. Andrei Rubanov: Тоже родина (Also a Motherland), a story collection.

17. Maria Rybakova: Гнедич (Gnedich), a novel in verse about Russian poet Nikolai Gnedich, the first Russian translator of The Iliad. Rybakova is also a poet. Excerpt

18. Figl’-Migl’: Ты так любишь эти фильмы (You Love Those Films So Much), a NatsBest finalist that lost in a tie breaker vote when Kseniia Sobchak cast her vote for Dmitrii Bykov instead. Sobchak said in an interview that she doesn’t consider F-M’s book literature. She also compares Bykov to McDonald’s and says she hates his ЖД (Living Souls) (previous post). Take that!

19. Margarita Khemlin: Крайний (Krainii: my previous post explains the title)

20. Andrei Sharyi and Iaroslav Shimov: Корни и корона (Roots and the Crown), essays about Austro-Hungary. (OpenSpace.ru review)

21. Mikhail Shishkin: Письмовник (Letter-Book) (previous post)

22. Nina Shnirman: Счастливая девочка (Lucky Girl) (excerpt); a book about a girl’s childhood that includes World War 2. I’m not clear if it’s strictly memoir or somewhat fictionalized. Either way, it was a Cosmo book of the month!

23. Gleb Shul’piakov: Фес (Fes or Fez, as you prefer), a novel. The publisher’s description says Fes is about a man who brings his wife to the maternity hospital and, when left to his own devices, ends up in a basement in an unidentified eastern city… sounds like more warped reality.

24. Aleksandr Iablonskii: Абраша (Abrasha), a novel with a vague summary.

25. Irina Iasina: История болезни (Case History) appears to be a memoir about having multiple sclerosis.

Up next: I’m hoping to finish Sergei Kuznetsov’s Хоровод воды (The Round Dance of Water) in time for a post next week.

Favorite Russian Writers A to Я: Lermontov

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:14:00 +0000

My favorite Russian L writer has been with me since I began reading in Russian in the ‘80s: Mikhail Lermontov. My Russian literature class read Lermontov’s story “Тамань” (“Taman’”) from the novel-in-stories Герой нашего времени (A Hero of Our Time); I read the entire book on my own a couple years later. Rereading and loving the book again two years ago was a treat, both because I could enjoy the quality of the writing so much more (thank goodness, after all those years!) and because Hero continues to be a source of allusions in contemporary Russian fiction. I should add that Lermontov’s poetry was a highlight of my grad school reading list.

Beyond Lermontov, though, my letter L reading has been a little limited... Leonid Leonov’s story Конец мелкого человека (The End of a Petty Man) was intriguingly peculiar (previous post) but now that I have some of his other books—Соть (Soviet River) and Вор (The Thief)—I have yet to pull one off the shelf to read. And then there’s Nikolai Leskov whose Леди Макбет Мценского уезда (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District) I read when I lived in Moscow. Unfortunately, my box of books with Lady Macbeth and other stories got lost somewhere between here and there: the box also contained Lolita and The Brothers Karamazov, so I’ve often wondered what went on in transit. One of these days I’ll buy some sort of replacement Leskov volume. A friend gave me Leskov’s Железная воля (An Iron Will), which I found less interesting than Lady Macbeth (previous post), though fairly easy to read. The blogger known as Amateur Reader, who writes Wuthering Expectations, recently read some Leskov and included fun links in posts. Another L writer on my shelf is Ivan Lazhechnikov, whose Ледяной дом (House of Ice) has been cooling its heels waiting for me for years. Maybe this winter.

Alas, contemporary L writers have yet to endear themselves to me… but maybe something by one of the Lipskerovs—Mikhail or Dmitrii—will grab me. Mikhail Lipskerov’s Белая горячка. Delirium Tremens (no translation needed, I think!) is dedicated to Venichka E and begins with a shot of vodka, so it’s definitely a book that calls for a specific type of reading mood.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Mikhail Lomonosov. Among other things, Lomonosov wrote poetry—I specifically remember his “Ода на взятие Хотина” (“Ode on the Taking of Khotin”) from my eighteenth-century Russian literature course—and helped reform literary Russian. He was also a scientist who wrote about topics like the uses of glass. Lomonosov and I crossed paths, albeit a couple centuries apart, in Arkhangel’sk, where I was given medallions with his profile. I owe Lomonosov some credit for helping me with my oral exams in Russian literature. I was a very undistinguished student of the history of the Russian language, so was grateful to be able to mention a visit to Arkhangel’sk when Lomonosov came up during my exam. One of my professors, Morton Benson, asked if I’d heard оканье there... the short explanation of оканье is that an unstressed “o” sounds like “o” instead of “a”—оканье can sometimes be heard in northern Russia. At any rate, I don’t remember what, exactly, I told Dr. Benson but I do remember that the unexpected tangent about travel certainly helped me relax.

As always, I look forward to readers’ thoughts on writers with names beginning with L.

Up next: I’m still enjoying Sergei Kuznetsov’s Хоровод воды (The Round Dance of Water), though it’s long…

Image credit: Self-portrait of Lermontov, via Wikipedia.

More Awards News & a Bit on Grekova’s Faculty

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 20:12:00 +0000

There are weeks (like, say, last week) when it feels like I can’t check my blog reader or Lenta.ru without finding more news about Russian literary awards. Book of the Year winners were named on Wednesday at the Moscow International Book Fair, and I was pleased to see that an eight-volume edition of works by Andrei Platonov, published by Vremia, won the main Book of the Year prize. Prose of the Year went to Olga Slavnikova’s Lightheaded (previous post); the other nominees in the prose category were Mikhail Shishkin’s Letter-Book (previous post) and a book of essays about history by Iakov Gordin. OpenSpace.ru has a full list of winners here, and some short lists are available here.

Then the Yasnaya Polyana award announced its six-book short list on Friday. I don’t know much about any of these writers or books but that, of course, is why I so enjoy following prize lists. The winner will be announced in late September or early October.

Ergali Ger’s Кома (Koma) – This novella/long story starts with the phrase “Родом Кома была из Рыбинска”—“Koma was a native of Rybinsk”—which got me interested because I once spent a couple days floating around the Rybinsk Water Reservoir on a research vessel and eating fresh fish.
Elena Katishonok’s Жили-были старик со старухой (Once There Lived an Old Man and His Wife) (excerpt) – This book was a Booker finalist in 2009.
Natal’ia Kliuchareva’s Деревня дураков (Village of Fools) – Kliuchareva is the only writer of the six that I’ve read so far: one of her stories is in the Rasskazy collection. It was one of my favorites. I still, BTW, highly recommend Rasskazy (previous post).
Irina Mamaeva’s Земля Гай (Gai Land, where Gai is the name of a settlement)
Iurii Mamleev’s Русские походы в тонкий мир (perhaps Russian Hikes/Campaigns Into a Subtle World?) – I still haven’t read much Mamleev, beyond a couple very short stories that I read at the beach recently.
Dmitrii Shevarov’s Добрые лица (Kind Faces)

As for I(rina) Grekova’s Кафедра (The Faculty): I realized I don’t have much to say about the book. After Grekova’s shorter Ship of Widows, Hairdresser, and Little Garusov, The Faculty felt a bit long and dispersed: the novel is composed of episodes in the lives of a math (cybernetics, I believe) department’s faculty members and students. The episodes are linked with various degrees of looseness and tightness; lives overlap like my beloved Venn diagrams. Grekova’s writing is, as usual, very readable, and she offers lots of insights and details on life, family, friendship, work, and death, reflecting Soviet reality… despite all that, plus Grekova’s tremendous compassion for her characters, The Faculty didn’t feel, well, special, compared with the other works I’ve read. I think the problem—a relatively minor one, I suppose, since I didn’t skim—is my preference for more tightly focused narratives.

Up Next: Well, there’s Leonid Girshovich’s “Вий”, вокальный цикл Шуберта на слова Гоголя (a title I’ve seen translated as “Viy,” Schubert’s Songs to Gogol’s Words), which I still think is peculiar. I’m also finding it a little repetitive and/or plodding, and definitely very showy so am going to do something I don’t usually do: read a chapter a day but focus more on another book, Sergei Kuznetsov’s Хоровод воды (Water’s Round Dance or The Round Dance of Water), a Big Book finalist. An excerpt, with comments from Kuznetsov, is on Snob. By coincidence, Kuznetsov’s book, which two friends recommended to me very highly, mentions the Rybinsk Water Reservoir in its early pages. Let’s hope this is a sign that it will help me break a streak of unsatisfying books.

Disclosures: Tin House, publisher of Rasskazy, is a publisher I enjoy speaking with about translated fiction.