Voices of Read Russia by Russia Beyond

RBTH presents

TRENDS / 20TH CENTURY CONTEMPORARY FICTION PRIZE WINNERS WOMEN WRITERS / POETRY CONFLICT / EMIGRES

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO ON THE TELEPHONE 1928

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CONTENTS: Eugene Abov

Trends .........................................................2–3

Publisher

20th Century ........................................... 4–5

Russia Beyond the Headlines proud partner of Read Russia

Contemporary Fiction...........................6–7 The Prize Winners ................................. 8–9 Women Writers ................................... 10–11

DEAR READERS We are delighted to present the second issue of “Voices of Read Russia”. We’ll offer you a glimpse into the newest trends from the trendmakers themselves, with articles from Russia’s top fiction editors and some of the most renowned writers. These literary sherpas help us introduce more of the next generation of acclaimed writers and projects now available in English. One of the most exciting trends “Voices of Read Russia“ explores with you here is women writers. They have conquered Russia’s literary Olympus in terms of acclaim and readership like never before. These women writers are charming, charismatic, lyrical, surreal, and sometimes, absolutely terrifying. You will not find Tolstoy in this issue, but we will sate your desire for the classics with precious gems of the 20th century that have garnered less attention than they deserve. Russia Beyond the Headlines, an internationally recognised source of news and analysis based in Moscow, is developing and expanding. The second volume of the digital app “Voices of Read Russia” will be released this spring, comprised of texts and newly ambitious multimedia. Those of you who want to learn more about Russian literature on a regular basis will appreciate the comprehensive and topical special section Read Russia at the Russia Beyond the Headlines website www.rbth.ru. RBTH editors and contributors consistently cover notable translations of recent books and introduce promising new writers. What better way to examine Russia’s cultural and social life than to delve into its contemporary literature? There is no better barometer for the changing temperature of Russian society. Time and again, Russian writers take the depths of existence and transform it before our eyes, radiant and whole.

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO IN A COMMUNAL APPARTMENT, 1932

New Light on Poetry ......................... 12–13 Generations of Conﬂict.....................14–15 The Émigrés .................................................16

THIS SPECIAL ISSUE WAS PRODUCED BY RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES, INTERNATIONAL PROJECTS DIVISION OF ROSSIYSKAYA GAZETA (RUSSIA). SUPPORTED BY THE BORIS YELTSIN PRESIDENTIAL CENTER. INTERNET: HTTP://RBTH.RU E-MAIL UK@RBTH.RU PH.: +7 (495) 775 3114 FAX: +7 (495) 988 9213 ADDRESS 24 PRAVDY STR., BLDG. 4, FLOOR 7, MOSCOW, RUSSIA, 125 993. PAVEL NEGOITSA DIRECTOR GENERAL, ROSSIYSKAYA GAZETA, EVGENY ABOV PUBLISHER RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES, ANDREI SHIMARSKY ART DIRECTOR ALEXANDER KISLOV DESIGNER IRINA PAVLOVA LAYOUT, ALENA TVERITINA EDITOR NORA FITZGERALD EDITOR ALEXANDRA GUZEVA ASSISTANT EDITOR SHAUNA MASSEY PROOFREADING ANDREI ZAITSEV HEAD OF PHOTO DPT. JULIA GOLIKOVA, COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR, JULIA. GOLIKOVA@RBTH.RU, TATYANA RUBLEVA REPRESENTATIVE IN UK (LONDON), TATYANA.RUBLEVA@RBTH.RU ANTONINA OSIPOVA SPECIAL PROJECTS MANAGER, ANTONINA.OSIPOVA@RBTH.RU E-PAPER VERSION OF THIS ISSUE IS AVAILABLE AT WWW.RBTH.RU © ROSSIYSKAYA GAZETA, 2013. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PHOTO PRO: MOSCOW HOUSE OF PHOTOGRAPHY, ITAR-TASS, PHOTOXPRESS, KOMMERSANT

RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES 2

THE LITERATI’S GUIDE TO RUSSIAN PUBLISHING RUSSIAN LITERATURE IS AT A CROSSROADS: WRITERS ARE SEEKING NEW GENRES, A NEW MODE OF EXPRESSION, AND NEW HEROES. LEADERS OF THE RUSSIAN LITERATI TELL RBTH WHAT THEIR MARKET NEEDS AND WHAT CONTEMPORARY READERS WANT ALENA TVERITINA

While print runs of paper books decrease every year and new platforms for reading are being introduced, the main questions for publishers remain the same: what do their readers want this time? Sales in the capital’s bookshops and online stores offer a rather detailed picture of the Russian reader. The top-ten bestsellers of 2012 included the latest Erast Fandorin novel by Russia’s most popular contemporary novelist Boris Akunin; Aleksandra Marinina’s crime novels; Dmitry Bykov’s political satire in verse“The Poet and Citizen”; trendsetter Viktor Pelevin’s novel“S.N.U.F.F.”; “New Watch” by popular fantasy-writer Sergei Lukyanenko; and an autobiography by TV presenter Vladimir Pozner. But the top places on the bestseller chart were the most intriguing; here the sinful and the virtuous engaged in eternal battle: a collection of true stories from the lives of contemporary Russian priesthood, written by Archimandrite Tikhon, competed with Erica James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Asked about the tendencies, both publishers and critics consider that one of the most noticeable trends in modern Russian literature is a pronounced interest in non-fiction. Renowned book editor Elena Shubina of AST publishing mentors a string of prize-winning authors. She notes a “surge in popularity of the classic family genre, where a family’s history is examined from greatgrandparents through to the present day. The same ap-

plies to non-fiction – memoirs, biographies, diaries. There is a sense of real-life, a story ‘about people’ – and this is what stimulates people’s interest.” Another prominent face of Russian publishing is editor Yulia Kachalkina of Eksmo publishing house. Kachalkina also works with the biggest names of Russian literature and is known for launching new Russian literary talent. She believes that today “people want to read stories – conceptualism is becoming less

THE FAMILY HISTORY GENRE IS SEEING A HUGE SURGE IN POPULARITY, WHERE GENERATIONS ARE FOLLOWED TO THE PRESENT DAY.

and less interesting, there is a demand for quality, reader-friendly prose, without unnecessary twists and turns. People are tired of mind games. Life itself is too complicated for them to seek complexity in what they read as well,” she said. Kachalkina also notes that trends in contemporary Russian prose are peculiar; “books in the memoir format, love stories, and stories about unusual people, people who stand out from the crowd – these are the books that tend to enjoy the greatest popularity.” In both literature and pulp fiction, writers are currently searching for fresh themes and new modes of expression. Kachalkina MAYA KUCHERSKAYA, WRITER AND LITERARY CRITIC

said they are also searching for true heroes:“Russian writers are moving towards heroic prose, sensing the demands of our age.” New movements in literature are closely intertwined with online developments: so, in the last few years popular writers have been joined by a large number of bloggers. Elena Shubina predicts that the internet’s influence will not end here: “it seems likely that the short novella – a genre many publishers prefer to eschew – will soon become a key trend, in part because the short-form genre is very much alive on the blogosphere.”

CONTEMPORARY FICTION 101

3 Notable

“If you want to find out about the basics of contemporary Russian prose you need to read Vladimir Makanin and Mikhail Shishkin: both of these writers have at least one great novel to their name – “Asan” and “Maidenhair.” The writers represent two poles of Russian liter-

MIKHAIL SHISHKIN THE LIGHT AND THE DARK Quercus

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO THE POET NIKOLAI ASEEV, 1927

ature – in the first case [Makanin] we have tough realism, a deep, almost merciless penetration into a person’s psychology, an understanding of the power structures, politics and history. And in the second example [Shishkin] we see intertwined elements of language, a constant dialogue with the Russian classics, and an amazing ability to listen to someone else’s voice, words, quality, the free music of language.” Maya Kucherskaya aya

In his latest novel, Shishkin holds two lovers captive in different eras. Again the celebrated author makes good on his promise to bridge new worlds for readers. And he manages this task with lyricism, grace and epic romance. Like his masterpiece, “Maidenhair,” this novel continues his lifelong explolove rration rat ation n of lo ove and loss.

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SPELLBOUND BY THE TABLET, RUSSIANS READ ELECTRONICALLY AS THE TABLET SEGMENT CONTINUES ITS EXPANSION IN RUSSIA, RBTH EXPLORES THE JOURNEY FROM THE PRINTED STORY TO THE ELECTRONIC WORD HENRIKE SCHMIDT

Some years ago, the media artist who calls himself Aleksroma created a work based on Dostoyevsky’s“The Idiot.”He presented the entire novel in the form of a ticker, single lines of electron-

ic text streaming across a board in the same way that breaking news is announced on Times Square. It takes roughly 24 hours for the ticker to run through the entire text.The“ticking Idiot”was prescient about how we read now, and our journey from the printed story to the electronic word. Russian publisher HokusPokus offers literary works exclusively

for iPads and iPhones in elaborate layouts. The texts are richly illustrated and the typography cleverly arranged. HokusPokus focuses on short prose especially, which faces an uphill battle competing with novels and text messages. One of the first iPad books to hit the market was a narrative entitled “Love” by Zakhar Prilepin with illustrations byVarvara Polyakova. The market in Russia for tablets is growing. According to the daily Vedomosti, approximately 800,000 devices were purchased in the first half of 2012, a 300 percent increase since they were launched. The Apple iPad continues to be the most popular de-

INEXPENSIVE, YET CREATIVE SOLUTIONS ARE NEEDED FOR THE NEW BOOK FORMATS TO GAIN TRACTION AMONG READERS

BOTH PUBLISHERS AND CRITICS CONSIDER THAT ONE OF THE MOST NOTICEABLE TRENDS IN TODAY’S RUSSIAN LITERATURE IS A PRONOUNCED INTEREST IN NON-FICTION

Translations of 2013 ALEXANDER SNEGIREV PETROLEUM VENUS New Russian Writing

ANDREI GELASIMOV THE LYING YEAR AmazonCrossing

A promising young architect suddenly finds himself a lonely single father of a teen with Down’s syndrome – and turns away from his glamorous lifestyle to raise the boy by himself. This somewhat bizarre modern-day fairy tale, despite its unlikely twists and turns, reads easily, narrated in a simple, unpolished is shed voice.

This novel by Andrei Gelasimov evokes the shifting morality of Moscow in the 1990s; behind the glamour is the emotional carnage of a world where trust is impossible. The novel is a dark comedy in Gelasimov’s usual, colloquial vein and explores fragmented, postmodern life, with its endemic failure ur re to connect.

DON’T MISS Russia’s Open Book, a new feature-length documentary hosted by Stephen Fry and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Paul Mitchell, has its world premiere in London in April. With contributions from such celebrated Russian authors as Boris Akunin, Zakhar Prilepin, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Olga Slavnikova, and Mikhail Shishkin, this Intelligent Television production gets inside the minds of some of Russian literature’s brightest lights and explores the continuing mystique and power of the Russian novel. Russia’s Open Book won’t be on television worldwide until the autumn, but Read Russia offers the chance to catch a sneak preview, and learn more about the story behind the film, at a press launch on April 14. BORIS AKUNIN, PROMINENT RUSSIAN WRITER, HISTORIAN AND JAPANESERUSSIAN TRANSLATOR

vice, but both Russian and Asian competitors are gaining in popularity due in large part to the lower prices. Inexpensive, creative solutions are needed for new book formats to gain traction among readers. The business model for illustrated iPad prose has proven too costly. Innovator Maxim Kotin recently teamed up with internet portal Slon.ru to promote and market his own digital book production.The project is called Fastbook, and includes essays and political reports on hot topics. Fastbook is the Russian version of Amazon’s Kindle Singles, which was introduced a couple of years ago. Its format includes self-published novella-length literature. But Kotin intends to significantly improve the Russian version, he said, especially where aesthetics is concerned.

RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES 4

BULGAKOV BEYOND THE TOP TITLES ‘A YOUNG DOCTOR’S NOTEBOOK,’ WHICH CAUSED A SENSATION ON TV IN THE UK, IS JUST ONE OF MIKHAIL BULGAKOV’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORKS: READ RUSSIA BRINGS MORE OF THE WRITER’S DIARIES OUT OF THE DUSTY ARCHIVES

ALEXANDRA GUZEVA

Mikhail Bulgakov reached a new audience in recent months when Daniel Radcliffe teamed up with John Hamm for the British TV show “A Young Doctor’s Notebook.”The premiere of the fourpart comedy drama brought Sky Arts one of its biggest audiences to date. All this came as some-

thing of a surprise in Russia, where the collection is nowhere near as popular as some of Bulgakov’s other works. Like Anton Chekhov, Bulgakov went to medical school. As a young doctor, he joined a clinic in Nikolskoe, a village about 200 miles from Moscow. Travelling to an emergency at night by troika through mounds of snow, he might as well have been 2,000 miles from the metropolis. Bulgakov’s semi-autobiographical stories were published in the 1920s in an obscure journal called Medical Worker. The author was blacklisted by Soviet authorities, who had a special distaste for his work. The doctor stories were pub-

lished together only in 1963, long after his death, and then not without the input of censors. The script for the TV drama, like the stories, begins with an inexperienced doctor who is called upon to supervise births and treat syphilis. Radcliffe masterfully depicts the panic as he scurries from a patient in agony to consult his textbooks. “A Young Doctor’s Notebook” is not the only collection that draws heavily from Bulgakov’s life. Other lesser-known works offer small epiphanies about him. “Notes on the Cuff” (1923) is drawn from Bulgakov’s experience of living on a writer’s salary in post-revolutionary chaos. Part of the work was lost completely, and this may

SEVERAL OF BULGAKOV’S WORKS DRAW AMPLY FROM HIS LIFE; SOME OF HIS STORIES WERE FIRST PUBLISHED IN AN OBSCURE MEDICAL JOURNAL

KO EN CH 5 OD 193 R R G, DE BER AN LEM EX AL GINA RE

D AN E FE LIF IN TH D C E R AD L R M STA CAUS NIE T DA N HAM THA EN S H H JO SERIE ON W I N SKY NSAT ED O T E R A S EMIE N LAS R IT P EVISIO TEL R A YE

PLATONOV: ICONIC WRITER OF THE 20TH CENTURY STORYTELLER, SOCIALIST, SOLDIER, SCUM: THE EXTRAORDINARY ANDREY PLATONOV

THE WRITER WAS ADMIRED BY BULGAKOV, PASTERNAK, AND LATER, THE POET BRODKSY WHO COMPARED PLATONOV WITH JOYCE ONE BLEAKLY SATIRIC NOVEL DESCRIBES WORKERS TRYING TO DIG THE FOUNDATIONS FOR A GRAND BUILDING THAT WILL NEVER BE BUILT

PHOEBE TAPLIN

Stalin wrote “scum” in the margin of one of Andrey Platonov’s surreal stories and told the editor to “give him a good belting.” Censored and supressed during his lifetime, Platonov, who was born in 1899, is now seen as a creative beacon of Soviet literature. In his introduction to a collection of Platonov’s stories called “Soul” (NYRB 2007), the translator Robert Chandler said:“All Russians consider Push-

kin their greatest poet; in time, I believe, it will become equally clear that Platonov is their greatest prose writer.” “Soul” includes the translator’s personal favourite, “The Return,” which also appeared in the anthol-

WWW.RBTH.RU 5 THE SOVIET AUTHORITIES RELUCTANTLY ALLOWED SOME OF BULGAKOV’S PLAYS ON THE STAGE BEFORE BANNING THEM ONE BY ONE

th century

amplify the text’s fragmented style. The main character, ill with typhus, is delirious. Bulgakov also pokes fun at the Soviet authorities in charge of censorship. The Soviet authorities reluctantly allowed some of his plays on the stage before banning them one by one. In a letter to writer and dramatist Maxim Gorky, Bulgakov wrote:“All my plays are banned, there is not a single line of my prose printed anywhere... not a penny of writer’s royalties... in short – everything I have written...has been destroyed. The only thing yet to be destroyed is me.” Bulgakov considered “A Theatrical Novel”to be his best work. In the story, a classically unhappy journalist quits his boring job to write a novel. The guests he invites to his home flatter and embrace

him but then say his novel will never be published. They promise that his novel will be staged instead, but deceive him. Sadly, Bulgakov had experienced each ach of these situations personally. y. Joseph Stalin himself refused used to approve Bulgakov’s “Dayss of the Turbins” – a play based d on one of his earliest works, “The The White Guard.” It examines the toll the revolution has taken n on the everyday life of the Turbin rbiin family as the horrors of civil war wa arr unfold during a harsh winterr in n Kiev. Blizzards are one of Bulgakov’s favorite motifs, and these hese storms make brutally effective tive appearances in “White Guard” ard” and“AYoung Doctor’s Notebook.” ok” The trials that characterised his work – civil war, unjust authorities, illness and despair – also reflected his life. What remains so moving is the funny, terrifying beauty he made of it all.

‘Happy Moscow’ reveals the beautiful nightmare that was the Soviet 1930s Mo Moscow Chestnova, an orphaned girl, born a ffew years before the Russian revolution, is named after the city she lives in. Her story strangely mirrors the triumphs and terrors ror of the new Communism. A powerfully alive aliv and beautiful young woman, she marries too young so that “her heart, which had sought heroism, began to love just one sly sou man…” Leaving him, she tells a stranger that ma she e loves “the wind in the air” and he advises her h to enroll in the school of aeronautics; she learns to fly, but plummets to earth after fire her accidentally setting fir i e to h er parachute. Following her “wandering” instincts, moves series of lovers, loses a leg while helping to stin st inct ctss sshe he m oves through a se build the Moscow metro, and finally disappears from her own tale. In parallel, author Andrei Platonov introduces the men who love Moscow: geometrician and town planner, Victor Bozhko, tirelessly writing letters in Esperanto to fellow Communists around the world, who celebrates Moscow as a model of a new humanity; or Sambikin, the immortality-seeking surgeon, who believes that the soul is located in the gut, in the “empty section between the food and the excrement.” Part of Platonov’s power as a writer lies in his combination of contrasting registers, the metaphysical and the scatological, scientific and romantic. The mechanical engineer, Semyon Sartorius, loves the young Moscow so profoundly that “he could have looked at waste products from her with extreme curiosity.” Philosophical meditations on the “mystery of existence” segue into trade union committees or construction-workers’ canteens. The effect is more like a dream than a novel; plot and character are secondary to the hallucinatory progress of vivid, revelatory scenes. The juxtaposition of dialogue and emotion with the language of Soviet bureaucracy creates a powerful impression of the time. Moscow’s injuries while working on the palatial new metro system are symbolic of individual cost. Platonov never officially finished “Happy Moscow,” but the novel he worked on for years, not published until 1991, reveals one of the greatest Soviet writers. PHOEBE TAPLIN

ogy“Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida” (Penguin, 2005). Chandler said in a recent interview with Read Russia:“This story about an army captain’s fraught return to his family at the end of the Second World War is witty, tender and wise....Anyone who has ever, in moments of impatience, felt the desire to smash up his existing, imperfect life and run off in pursuit of some illusion of a perfect life elsewhere … can learn something from this story.” Platonov has been widely admired by fellow writers, including Pasternak and Bulgakov; the poet, Joseph Brodsky, saw him as the equal of Joyce and Kafka; the historian, Orlando Figes, considers the discovery of Platonov’s previously unpublished manuscripts as “the most precious [literary] dividend from the collapse of the Soviet system.” A working class boy from Voronezh, Platonov worked on the railroad as a teenager, fought with

the Red Army before he was twenty, and died in obscure poverty at the age of 52. Many of his texts were published only posthumously, like the unfinished“Happy Moscow,”written during the 1930s. In his first works in the early 1920s, Platonov dreamed of a utopian future. He worked on land reclamation projects, wrote ambiguous novels and stories, became a war reporter and a publisher of children’s literature. He caught tuberculosis from his son, who had returned from a prison camp. “The Foundation Pit” is Platonov’s best-known novel, unpublished in Russia until 1988. The bleakly satirical story describes a group of early Soviet workers trying to dig the foundations for a grand building which will never be built. A recent anthology of “Russian Magic Tales”includes stories Platonov wrote while he was dying.“His courage and tenacity were remarkable,” said Chandler, quoting a passage about a

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO SPORTS PARADE ON RED SQUARE, 1932

plane tree whose trunk has encircled stones“with patient bark, made them something it could live with … meekly lifting up as it grew taller what should have destroyed it.”Written in 1934, this “now seems to be a description of Platonov himself.”

RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES 6

DEPICTING THE WONDERS OF EVERYDAY LIFE WRITER IGOR SAKHNOVSKY EXTRACTS THE MIRACULOUS FROM THE MUNDANE AND SPINS YARNS IN WHICH THE MOST FANTASTICAL TWISTS AND TURNS ARE ROOTED IN REALITY

ALENA TVERITINA

A young man hears the voice of his long-dead grandmother offering him to go to a nearby town. At the train station, he inadvertently saves the life of a homeless man. This man turns out to be his grandfather, who was thought to have perished in the camps many years ago. These serendipitous events – which the author asserts are true – prompted the then 30-year-old poet and magazine editor to pen his first novel,“The Vital Needs of the Dead.” Sakhnovsky, who is 54, writes prose where the stylistic originality and opulent language combine with unconventional and entertaining plots. Many of the characters are based on real people but are joined by archetypes.The author does not restrict himself to any particular time frame: a novel can weave together stories of the Middle Ages and the present day. “Magic realism,” thinks the reader. “Pseudodocumentary prose,”said the author, who explained that, “life’s cornucopia of non-fictional material renders fantasy unnecessary.” The world of science fiction sometimes claims him for itself: for example, in 2008,

REVEALING THE SOURCES OF HIS INSPIRATION, SAKHNOVSKY, A PROSE MASTER WITH A POETIC GIFT, ACKNOWLEDGES THAT “THERE ARE SITUATIONS, PEOPLE, AND MOMENTS IN LIFE THAT CAUSE WILD INFATUATION, AND THE ONLY OPTION IS TO MASTER IT ARTISTICALLY”

of her grandson. Sakhnovsky himself grew up in the small Ural town of Orsk, and certain peripeteia are indeed based on real events, including the story of his grandmother, who was forced to flee with her small son from Moscow to the Urals to escape the Stalinist purges. Sakhnovsky’s rich, singular and idiosyncratic language is borne of his long fascination

RUSSIAN WRITER IGOR SAKHNOVSKY

Sakhnovsky’s background is both simple and extraordinary within Russian literary circles, where almost all the key players live in Moscow or St. Petersburg, or ply their trade abroad. Sakhnovsky lives in the Ural city of Yekaterinburg, and works as the literary editor of a magazine there. His first novel,“TheVital Needs of the Dead”,is a rite-of-passage story about a boy growing up in a small Ural town, and his relationship with his grandmother, who for much of the novel is dead, yet continues to influence the life

with poetry; he published collections of verse in the 1980s. “However, fine [word craft] should not drown out the overall appeal,” said the writer. In his second novel,“The Man Who Knew Everything,”Sakhnovsky plays with genres and twists the storyline. The protagonist is endowed with superpowers and hunted by several global intelligence agencies.In Russia, the novel was adapted for the screen by directorVladimir Mirzoyev, who understood the cinematic quality of Sakhnovsky’s prose.

LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO CALL HOME

An impudent cat, a circumnavigating sperm whale, a latter-day Moses and an aviation-mad Arab: these are just a few of the extraordinary characters who populate the pages of Ilya Boyashov’s celebrated adventure story. “The Way of Muri”won the Russian National Bestseller award when it first came out in 2007. Amanda Love Darragh has rendered this wise and funny novel into English. She negotiates registers that range from colloquial dialogue to pseudo-biblical speeches or Latin-peppered academia with an ease that suits the book’s essential light-heartedness.

Sakhnovsky’s novel “The Man Who Knew Everything” won the Bronze Snail prize, traditionally a sci-fi award (other winners of this award includeViktor Pelevin and Dmitry Bykov). Sakhnovsky has also been in the running for other emblematic Russian awards. Despite not getting the final nod, he has been shortlisted for the Big Book, National Best Seller, and Russian Booker prizes. Sakhnovsky said he believes that his books contain neither mystery nor fantasy, just a keen interest in what is usually described as miraculous:“Scientists

ILYA BOYASHOV’S AWARD-WINNING NOVEL “THE WAY OF MURI” PLAYFULLY EXAMINES SOME SERIOUS QUESTIONS PHOEBE TAPLIN

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO PIONEER, 1928

Contemp

IGOR SAKHNOVSKY, THE VITAL NEEDS OF THE DEAD. PUBLISHED BY GLAGOSLAV IN 2012

consider that only about 6 percent of what surrounds us can be perceived. The remaining 94 percent cannot be recognised by the ordinary physical senses.”Fellow writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya said about the author:“Sakhnovsky is in possession of a rare gift, which he uses to describe not only the visible exterior, but the volatile essence of what is taking place. It is not a method, not a literary device, not a cerebral design, but the writer’s all-seeing eye.”

AN ACCLAIMED EDITOR DEMYSTIFIES THE DELUGE OF MANUSCRIPTS THAT CLAIM HER INBOX THE HIGH-POWERED EDITOR OF PELEVIN AND BYKOV REVEALS THE UNRELENTING NATURE OF HER GAME YULIA KACHALKINA

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YULIA KACHALKINA

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The novel’s outline is bizarre: two ancient Chinese philosophers quarrel over whether a journey should lead to some goal or be an end in itself; this question becomes central to the skimpy plot. Muri, a young cat forced by the 1990s civil war to leave his Bosnian village, follows the fleeing family to recover his bowl and blanket. Muri’s encounters as he walks across Europe sometimes have an allegorical flavour. Towards the start he travels with Rabbi Jacob, who is leading the local Jews to safety; near the end, he meets a scruffy Polish dog called Adolf who lives at a“permanent cross-

There are hordes of writers in modern Russia, a good 20 of them for every 24 hours, seven days a week. Why am I quantifying writers in hours, you may ask? Because it is the busy publishing house editor’s most reliable means of logging the deluge of submitted manuscripts. Day after day, Russian-speaking authors from around the country and abroad send me novels, novellas, short stories, poems, essays, articles and items that often defy categorisation (although they are for the most part political propaganda). Sometimes it seems that I am dealing with a Russia that has no collective consciousness and is geographically disembodied, strewn across every continent. And in itself, this might be regarded not as literature per se but as a kind of living flow of written human expression - just recall how Anna Akhmatova wrote about “the tormented mouth, through which one hundred million people scream.” Here we have a somewhat similar situation, only the one hundred million scream straight into my email inbox. Obviously it is impossible to publish every one of these writers.Yet in today’s socio-political and cultural conditions, people simply have nowhere else to take their problems, since the

institutions that should deal with them are in a continual state of collapse. During the most active days of the protest movement, when people attended demonstrations like they would class reunions, the editorial staff was inundated with submissions about “thieves and swindlers.” Their artistic virtues were extremely dubious, but the striving shone through nonetheless, namely to strike this vile metal while it was still hot. And among this occasionally insane deluge of material there are sometimes, albeit very rarely, texts that usher the author into the publishing world. This was the case with Igor Savelyev’s “Tereshkova flies to Mars.” The 27-year-old journalist from Ufa sent me a novel that was basically about himself and the young dreamers of his generation. I saw in this novel not just a philosophy for a generation, but a clean and concise dispatch. Another lucky stroke occurred with the manuscripts of Carpathian writer Mariana Goncharova, and with the wonderfully incisive and topical “Ursula’s Monogrammed Shoulder,” by Samarabased writer Nalatya Fomina. So you can never tell what you will find in your mailbox any given morning, whether it will be a warning about yesterday‘s end of the world, or tomorrow’s new bestseller. Yulia Kachalkina manages contemporary prose at Exmo, and represents Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Voinovitch, Yury Buida and Dmitry Bykov.

Contempor

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ALEXANDER RODCHENKO MORNING EXERCISES, 1932

roads,” unable to decide ecide which of life’s many paths ths to follow. Meanwhile, Sheikh heikh Abdullah, owner of “thirty thirty beautiful women and fifteen fifteen oilfields,”is determined y d to o fl fly non-stop around the world. wo orlld. d. Each of these travellers rs reprep epresents a different kind ind of of journey, bringing to life ife the philosophical debatess with which the book began.. From this unpromising ng premprem ise, Boyashov creates a story that meanders delightfully from comic, anthropomorphic fun to thoughtful meditation and back. It rivals Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” in packing some complex

ILYA BOYASHOV, THE WAY OF MURI, HESPERUS CLASSICS, 2013

metaphysical questions into a ques slim and readable novella. “The Way of Muri” has an erratic style that is well matched to the wandering narrative, but its patchwork is uneven. The feline hero lives in an animistic uni-

verse, where every house and tree has its own spirit. In Boyashov’s other, parallel narratives there is no sign of this animism; the endless, global journeys of a nomadic whale draw instead on the imagery of“Moby Dick,”conjuring up a sudden and violent battle with a giant squid near Easter Island. The common link between the different parts of “The Way of Muri” is that they are all part of Boyashov’s transcendent “hymn to movement.”He invokes Greek myths and Spanish Legends. Some of Boyashov’s odysseys reach Ithaca; for others, the journey will never end.

RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES 8

PELEVIN HAS MADE A NAME FOR HIMSELF IN WESTERN PUBLISHING CIRCLES, AND THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE NOVELTY OF HIS ROOTS

Victor Pelevin, the guru of the Russian reading public and Russia’s No. 1 intel(and therefore lectual, who has readers) see the a new book on the world. shelves this year, ofThe main action fering us a chance to is played out on the ruminate on his creative windowsill – where influence. these two different worlds For two decades now, his work meet, somewhere suspended behas been a beacon of light on the tween reality and portrayed recultural life of a country whose ality. This is exactly the place history is difficult and whose where Victor Pelevin is in his elsocio-economic situation is far ement; as a poet, a philosopher from ideal. and chronicler of ordinary life. Creating the myths and legAs a writer whose experience ends of the new Russia, Pelevin straddles two different epochs, writes books that are deep, poi- pre and post-perestroika, Pelevin sonous, funny and endlessly in- chooses characters that simultaventive. They capture the plight neously inhabit two different of contemporary Russia in all its worlds. colour and intricacy. His novels The Soviet officials from the are based on a single philosoph- story Prince Gosplan (available ical principle: according to this, in English in the collection, “A our world is just a series of ar- Werewolf Problem in Central tificial constructions, in which we humans are doomed to forever wander around blindly, searching in vain for the ‘real’ CREATING reality. THE MYTHS AND None of these worlds are true, but neither can they be LEGENDS OF THE NEW called false, at least not RUSSIA, PELEVIN MIXES while people believe in them. So each version of the THE STRUGATSKY BROTHERS world only exists in our WITH STANISLAV LEM AND hearts and minds, and we MARINATES THEM IN cannot recognise the psychological reality as false. JORGE LUIS So Pelevin’s masterpiece BORGES “Chapayev and Pustota,”(called “Buddha’s Little Finger”in English) also known as Russia’s first Zen-Buddhist novel, is based on the indivisible nature of real and Russia: And Other Stories”) live projected reality.The author man- alternative lives in a computer ages to successfully create mi- game. Lumpen from the story rages by varying the scale and “Bulldozer Driver’s Day” turns structure of the fictional lens, the out to be an American spy. window through which heroes But this kind of transforma-

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ALEXANDER GENIS

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AS A WRITER WHOSE EXPERIENCE STRADDLES TWO ERAS, PRE AND POST-PERESTROIKA, PELEVIN CREATES CHARACTERS THAT SIMULTANEOUSLY INHABIT DIFFERENT WORLDS

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VICTOR PELEVIN EXPLORES VERSIONS OF REALITY AND OFFERS A RAY OF HOPE

tion is just one aspect of Pelevin’s work. References to the contemporary world are placed in the context of the eternal, and knowledge of the eternal is what all Pelevin’s heroes and antiheroes are striving for. Adventures that divert the consciousness from the path of truth, a truth that evades description by words, but that must be described and understood nonetheless – this is the main thrust of all Pelevin’s works. If this was all, it would be simple, but there’s a catch. Like many authors Pelevin sees everything, knows everything, and believes in nothing, but unlike many post-modernist writers, Pelevin offers a ray of hope. Drawing on the philosophy of Plato, Pelevin assures us that behind the reality that we see, there is another reality. And whatever it is, and whatever we choose to call it, this is where there is hope, and this is Pelevin’s gift to his faithful readership, who, like all of Pelevin’s heroes, “just want the beautiful – something that will change everything.” Pelevin has made a name for himself in Western publishing circles – and this has nothing to do with the novelty of his cultural roots. Pelevin is read in translation, and renowned as a contemporary author in the UK, the US, France and also in Japan, where he is especially popular. Culture-specific Soviet references, which not many people understand in the West, have not stood in the way of his success. Good translations have put Pelevin up there on par with the best masters of the quirky, philosophical, fantastical realism that is making the 21st century a better and more interesting place to live.

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A SAMPLER OF VICTOR PELEVIN BOOKS IN TRANSLATION “Omon Ra” was immediately likened to Gogol. The Observer critic wrote that the absurd journey of the cosmonaut is “full of the ridiculous and the sublime.” “Buddha’s Little Finger” is set in two periods of upheaval as well as in a psychiatric ward of a hospital. Victor Pelevin blends not only time but also questions identity, and the real nature of the characters is only revealed in fits and starts. “The Blue Lantern and Other Stories” brings together eight of his best stories, and includes the story of a shed that wants to become a bicycle. “The Yellow Arrow” would be terrifying if the passengers on the one-way train were not so blasé about the whole thing. “The Arrow” is heavy on metaphor lightened by the absurdity that people get used to everything. “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia” won the Booker Prize for short story collections; the central story is indeed about a group of Russians who turn into wolves.

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EVERYDAY SAINTS ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR BOOKS AMONG RUSSIAN READERS THESE DAYS IS A CONTEMPORARY VERSION OF THE “LIVES OF THE SAINTS.” THE FERVENT WORK EXPLORES DEVOTION AND FAITH IN THE POSTMODERN AGE IN A COUNTRY WHERE BELIEF IN GOD WAS REPRESSED; NOT SURPRISINGLY IT HAS SOARED ON THE RUSSIAN BESTSELLER LISTS ALISA ORLOVA

S R NNE ORT ORTHODOX OX X LITERATURE LIT LITERA TER ERA ATUR TURE E IS IS INCR IINCREASINGLY NCR CREAS EASING EAS ING GLY POPULA POP UL R WIT TH H MA MANY NY SUC SUCCES CESSFU CES SFUL SFU L WORKS W POPULAR WITH SUCCESSFUL

Olma Media Group debuted a new kind of book at the 2011 Moscow Book Fair. Titled “Everyday Saints,” it was written by Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov, abbot of the Sretensky Monastery. Nearly 500 pages in its new English translation, the book tells powerful stories from the lives of p contemporary Orthodox monks c and priests. Olma bet big on the a book, giving it a first-print run of b 60,000 copies.“Everyday Saints” 6 iis a surprising, if not miraculous bestseller, with several editions b and more than a million sold in a Russia. Father Tikhon’s at-times R mystical revelation even ran away m with several top literary prizes. w These stories are far from the ttypical fare, which often combines a Soviet-style didactic tone b with tried-and-true parables w ffrom the Bible and are abundant iin any Russian church shop. Sec-

“EVERYDAY SAINTS” IS A BESTSELLING BOOK BY ARCHIMANDRITE TIKHON SHEVKUNOV

ular writer and playwright Pavel Sanaev said the work fills a niche. “You can find out from this book what faith is all about. The book clarifies many doubts....We have been missing a book with contemporary life stories,” Sanaev said.

Archpriest Maksim Kozlov, a philologist and rector at the Church of Saint Serafim of Sarov in Moscow, said:“Father Tikhon’s book...uses a language and raises the issues in a context that is interesting not only to the narrow circle of churchgoers, but also to a broader audience.” Nearly 53 percent of respondents in a 2012 poll called themselves Orthodox, although 26 percent said they never attended services. But Orthodox literature is increasingly popular. One of the most outstanding series is“Nastya and Nikita,”for young readers. Foma publishing house rolled out illustrated paperbacks targeting children aged five to 11 and promoting Christian values; two books are available each month, with print runs of 5,000 copies each.“Nastya and Nikita” is a non-profit project aiming to provide affordable, high-quality literature for children.

A VIRTUOSIC TRANSLATION OF SHISHKIN’S ‘MAIDENHAIR’ MIKHAIL SHISHKIN, ARGUABLY RUSSIA’S GREATEST LIVING NOVELIST, ADVISES READERS, “WHOEVER CAN BE HAPPY RIGHT NOW, SHOULD,” AND, IN THE GREAT TRADITION, RELATES JOY WITH SUFFERING

Many people say Mikhail Shishkin is Russia’s greatest contemporary novelist. He was the first Russian writer to win all three major literary awards. His work is rich and complex; his style is uniquely textured and allusive. His 2005 novel “Maidenhair”appears this month in Marian Schwartz’s virtuosic English translation. His latest, “Pismovnik,”will follow next spring. Shishkin said in a speech that an author is“a link between two worlds.”The hero of“Maidenhair” is – as Shishkin himself was – an interpreter for the Swiss immigration authorities. The novel opens with a reference to Xe-

MIKHAIL SHISHKIN

PHOEBE TAPLIN

nephon, which the interpreter is reading during his breaks, and then plunges into a series of interviews with asylum seekers, often from Chechnya, recounting horrors; “I lived in an orphanage since I was ten. Our director raped me.” Both questions and answers morph into a se-

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO EMERGENCY AMBULANCE, 1931

MAIDENHAIR BY MIKHAIL SHISHKIN, 2012, OPEN LETTER BOOKS

ries of evocative monologues, interspersed by memories, letters to the interpreter’s son, or extracts from the diaries of a Russian singer. Her loves and tragedies give the novel a human core. “Maidenhair”is not light reading. The narratives fuse and fragment in this masterpiece, whose ambitious goal encompasses the recreation of language in order to express truths. One idea that weaves through the stories is that “whoever can be happy right now, should,” that pain and joy are connected. There is sometimes an unbearable intensity as the metaphors writhe throughout. But it is hard to wish the 500 breathtaking pages of“Maidenhair”any less than they are.

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WHO’S THE NEXT TOLSTOY? THE NEXT GREAT AUTHOR IS A WOMAN! FEMALE AUTHORS REGULARLY OUTSELL THEIR MALE COLLEAGUES, AND ARE GAINING INCREASING INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION

ades in a fast-changing and often hostile world.” Irina Bogatyreva, whose travel memoirs have already been published in English in the compilation of hitch-hiking stories “Off the Beaten Track” (Glas, 2012), kicks off the collection with an intriguing short story about identity. Some of the writers inhabit male narrators, who can live more freely. In other

PHOEBE TAPLIN

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It is hardly surprising that three out of the six finalists for the 2012 Russian Booker Prize were women: Half of all contemporary Russian authors are now female, and publishers say they regularly outsell their male colleagues. But this is a relatively recent phenomenon. With a few exceptions, like the poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, men have traditionally dominated the Russian literary canon. The Russian Booker was founded in 1992, but was not awarded to a female author until 2001. “THERE ONCE Lyudmila Ulitskaya, who scooped the prize with LIVED A GIRL WHO a novel called “The Kukotsky Case,” is now a SEDUCED HER SISTER’S grande dame of Russian letters with numerous HUSBAND AND HE award-winning novels to her name. In the wake HANGED HIMSELF” of writers like Ulitskaya ya and Tatyana Tolstaya BY PETRUSHEVSKAYA (great grandniece of Leo Tolstoy), (PENGUIN 2013) things have changed fast, st, with women gaining increasing ng recognition in Russia and abroad. Lyudmilla Petrushevskaya’s skaya’s collection of scary storiess“There Once Lived a Woman Who ho Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’ss Bab Baby” ab by” y (Penguin, 2009) was a New ew wYork York Yo k Times bestseller. Olga SlavnikSla av vn nik ikova, whose novel “Light-Head” t-He ead ad” is on this year’s Russian n Booker err shortlist, is another celebrated lebrated d No w writer captures the munnovelist, famous for her distincdane horrors of domestic detive dark comedy and hints of spair Taken tospai ir quite like Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. Pe magic realism. Slavnikova gether, her new collection of short stories, written ova won gether the Booker, six years ago with between 1972 and 2008, reveals more about Russian her dystopian fantasy “2017” family life in the 20th century than any non-fiction. (Overlook, 2010) and has helped Sober and grim, these seventeen stories eschew the encourage new writers as direcsupernatural twists and scary magical realism emtor of the Debut Prize. A recent ployed in her earlier, acclaimed collection, “There compilation of works by DeOnce Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbut’s women writers sugbour’s Baby.” gests that the success of Yet they still read like fairy tales of a sort, small contemporary women parables that occur in fetid apartments, soiled writers has inspired youngbeds, dank doorways and kitchens stocked with er authors to contribute to moonshine, stale bread and bologna. When this literary renaissance. the stories end with a shred of hope, Somewhat unimaginaor even a numbing of the pain, tively titled “Still Wathe poignance can be hard ters Run Deep,” the to bear. Yet you keep readnew anthology showing. Surprising expressions of cases a varied range of love and simple acts of loyalty talents. Slavknikova destand out in relief, surrounded scribes them as young by the chaos of fear. women “who have grown In Petrushevskaya’s world of bad up over the past two decchoices, there is no pure, uncor-

stories, by contrast, young women struggle with narrow models of existence, reinforced by deprivation or envy (as in playwrightYaroslava Pulinovich’s dramatic monologue, “Natasha’s Dream”) or illness, like Victoria

E U Q N CO USS R T LI O

Revealing the mundane horrors of the Russian family

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO

rupted way to end a story. This is especially true in a world where family members disappear or decline slowly from alcoholism, and the family apartment can be perceived as a lottery ticket that could end generations of poverty and trouble. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938, and much of her life is one of those awful reminders of what the 20th century was like. When she was a child in Moscow, her father walked out of the apartment one day and never came back, a recurring theme in her writing. Many in her family were imprisoned and executed in Stalin’s purges. She ended up in an orphanage. At least, she has told journalists, there were regular meals and occasional entertainment, including a gypsy performance that stuck in her memory. Now in her 70s, Petrushevksaya’s recent decision to become a cabaret singer has been met with some confusion and controversy. She does not seem to care. Each of her tales in this newly translated collection, “There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband and He Hanged Himself,” published by Penguin Books and lovingly translated by Anna Summers bears witness to generations of traumatised families, dispersed and disorderly, but from time to time capable of love. NORA FITZGERALD

MORNING EXERCISES, STUDENT CAMPUS IN LEFORTOVO, 1932

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R E U S ’ A I Y S R S A R S E U T I P M Y L O

Chikarneeva’s dying teenager in“I Only Wanted to Live.”The narrator of Chikarneeva’s second story recalls her life while trapped inside a zinc-lined pipe. The metaphorical restriction is explicit:“As a small child I had already begun crawling into my pipe. Adults taught us what we could and couldn’t do.” One of the most accomplished new writers is acerbic and cynical Anna Babiashkina, whose award-winning novel “Before I Croak”is also due out in English soon. It tells the story of a group of older women, trying to realise their literary ambitions in a suburban Moscow nursing home. Like Slavnikova’s “2017,” Tolstaya’s “Slynx” (NYRB Classics, 2007) and others, the novel is set in the future, but where the older novelists’ satirical targets are more political, Babiashkina’s are personal and social. There is a post-feminist undercurrent to the writing, in which women are responsible for their own problems, culprits as well as victims. Several of Ulitskaya’s earlier works are also available in English, often dealing with family life and the need for tolerance. Russian-born American novelist, Gary Shteyngart, said in a review of Ulitskaya’s “Sonechka” (Schocken, 2005) that the women she wrote about were:“unlike any you have met before. They are charming, intelligent, seductive, and strong enough to carry an entire dysfunctional country on their backs.”It is hard to predict which women will carry Russian literature further forward, but readers can confidently look forward to more great novels from a country famous for its literary traditions.

THE RUSSIAN WOMAN KNOWS JUST WHAT TO HOPE FOR AS HE COMPILED A RECENT ANTHOLOGY OF YOUNG RUSSIAN WOMEN WRITERS, PROMINENT AUTHOR ZAKHAR PRILEPIN FOUND COMMON THEMES THAT INTRIGUED AND DISTURBED HIM ZAKHAR PRILEPIN

To the Western reader with a basic grasp of Russian literature, contemporary Russian women’s prose evokes such names as Ludmila Ulitskaya, Tatyana Tolstaya and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, all of whom became known in the late 1980s. It’s probably futile to seek a common denominator among these literary giants. Their prose is seldom life-affirming, and generally weighs heavily on the reader, at times painting the bleakest impression. The explanation is simple enough: These writers spent the greater part of their lives in the Soviet Union, and their recollections of these years tend to be harsh. That’s just how it was in those times. The next generation of serious writers, emerging in the 1990s, yielded much less, and it would be quite a stretch to name any of these on an equal footing with Ulitskaya, Tolstaya and Petrushevskaya. The strongest prose writer of that period is Olga Slavnikova, who arguably stands alone, an heiress of the Nabokov tradition. Overall, however, women’s prose of the 1990s carried a sense of rampant, almost shameless liberation. One can recall the novels of the prematurely departed Natalya Medvedeva. Women writers strove to distance themselves as far and forcefully as possible from Soviet prudishness and any attempt to restrict the freedom of the individual, women included. But there was already a foreshadowing of some kind of inevitable tragedy. Soviet power is now long gone, by almost a quarter of a century.Yet an entire generation of new female writers who did not fully experience those times had matured, and was compelled instead to somehow find its way in this equally unsa-

voury new era. Truth be told, the stye of a good number of authors of the Soviet era was quite crude. Every ugliness endured by their protagoтists was explained away as a by-product of the toxic Soviet regime. It was almost as if people would have been unconditionally happy were it not for Soviet rule. Men and women would not break up or torment each other, every last person would have enjoyed a serene childhood, and life would have been picture perfect.

DOZENS OF TEXTS FEATURED NO MEN AT ALL! IF ALL OF THIS IS FEMINISM, THEN IT IS AS IF IT HAS BEEN FOISTED ON WOMANKIND: SHE DID NOT WANT IT, NOR DOES SHE PARTICULARLY NEED IT In the decades after Soviet rule, as awful as parts of it were, women did not become any happier. I was recently commissioned to compile an anthology of the latest women’s prose. It comprised short stories and novellas of 14 writers aged 25 to 40. The works of the most prominent names of this generation – Maya Kucherskaya, Alisa Ganieva, Anna Starobinets and Natalya Klyucharyova – had already been translated into the main European languages, and you may compare your impressions of their writing with my own. I simply chose stories that I liked from the leading women writers. Before submitting the manuscript, I reread it once again and was surprised to see just how clearly some tendencies shone

through: Contemporary women’s prose is characterised by political apathy. The world around a woman has so little epic content that it is necessary to find something eternal within oneself and not externally. Another hallmark of this genre of prose is the determination of the heroine to find happiness – but this never translates into reality. There is no more Stalin, no more NKVD. Even the wars in Chechnya did not affect such a large part of the Russian population as one might think.Yet one gets the sense that the lyrical characters inhabit a deeply oppressive and wicked world, it is a fearful thing to give birth here and even more perilous to live in it. The tragic premonitions of the 1990s and the following decade has become a tuning fork, setting a constant tone: the sense of bewilderment and pain becomes a sense of impending horror in, say, the work of Starobinets. But what troubled me in these texts by the new generation was the absence of men. Not even appearing in the role of providers, let alone as main protagonists.The woman in contemporary prose creates her life in solitude. By nature, women cannot live for the sake of irrational values – only men have such a luxury.Women bear children, and that means there must be a future, which in turn means that there must be hope. And hope there is. In spite of everything, it is there, but exactly where, I have yet to understand. E v i d e n t l y, hope is woman herself.

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO VARVARA STEPANOVA, 1925

RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES 12

NABOKOV’S POETRY: RIDICULOUS OR SUBLIME?? A NEW VOLUME OF “COLLECTED POEMS” (PENGUIN, N, 2012) REVEALS UNUSUAL FACETS OF THE FAMOUS NOVSN OV O VELIST, FROM CHILDISH NONSENSE TO ÉMIGRÉ INSOMNIA OMN MNIA IA PHOEBE TAPLIN

Vladimir Nabokov, celebrated for masterpieces in Russian and in English including “Lolita” and “Pale Fire,” was ashamed of his juvenile attempts at poetry. He referred, in his 1970 collection “Poems and Problems” to “the steady mass of verse which I began to exude in my youth … with monstrous regularity.” Judging by a new book, surveying six decades of Nabokov’s poetic output, he was right to be embarrassed about his early works. Most teenage versifying is best forgotten, and to open the volume with“Music,”which Nabokov wrote when he was fifteen, gives a ridiculous impression of the writer’s skills, and of his son

Dmitri’s powers of translation. ation on.. The repetition of archaic verbs verb bs like “plashing” and clichéd simi iles “like diamonds” must have made the older Nabokov wince. The mature novelist’s pitchperfect ear for tone and metaphor becomes evident in the playful, later poems, especially those written in English. Dmitri Nabokov’s translations don’t always do justice to the Russian poems. To dispense with rhymes is excusable (even necessary), but to translate into lines that do not scan distorts the aural grace of the original. Despite all this, the autobiographical intimacies in this book will fascinate Nabokov’s fans. He writes movingly and perceptively about language, memory, identity and exile. In “Poems and Problems,”he identified the stages of his early poetic career.“The University Poem,”written in 1926 and published here for the first time in English, rec a l l s

POET LYDIA PASTERNAK STEPS OUT OF THE SHADOW

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AUTOB AU TOBIOG OGRAP RAPHIC HICAL AL INT INTIMA INTIMACIES IMACIE CIES S IN IN THE BO OOK WIL W L FASCINATE NABOKOV BOOK WILL FANS

Nabokov’s student years in Cambridge. One of several tropes familiar from the novels is the selfalienated persona of t h e n a r r a t o r. Again he is the exotic émigré, here seen t h ro u g h t h e eyes of Violet, a local girl he meets while at tea with the vicar.“It’s the first time / I have met a Russian.” As in many of the poems, there are comic elements, like Violet’s serial affairs with“Jim, the soccer star”or“Joe, the pensive one”; there is also homesickness, wistful or violent, triggered by sunsets, mosquitoes, rare snowy days. Language, as a theme,

BORIS PASTERNAK’S NEPHEW, NICOLAS PASTERNAK SLATER, BRINGS TO LIGHT THE LYRICAL POEMS OF HIS MOTHER, WHO WROTE IN GERMAN, RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH GEORGE BUTCHARD

Nicolas Pasternak Slater, nephew of celebrated Russian writer Boris Pasternak, is collaborating with the department of Slavonic studies at Vienna University to publish a trilingual edition of his mother’s poetry. Lydia Pasternak Slater has long been in the shadow of her famous brother, Boris Pasternak, one of the most beloved poets of the 20th century and author of “Dr. Zhivago.” However her poetry allows her to stand alone in this celebrated literary family. Written in German, Russian, and English, her poems exhibit lyricism and range, encompassing witty pieces written for colleagues, as well as reflections on unhappy periods in her life. It also reflects her love for nature, a passion she shared with her brother, Boris. Nicolas Pasternak Slater is a retired hematologist who now lectures at literary festivals

THE PASTERNAK FAMILY: BORIS PASTERNAK IS IN THE TOP ROW, SECOND LEFT, HIS SISTER LYDIA IS IN THE FRONT ROW ON THE FAR RIGHT

The Pasternak family was split in 1921, when Boris’s parents and two sisters emigrated from the fledgling Soviet Union for Berlin. The family expected to be reunited, but the political situation and Boris’ determination to live and work in Russia ultimately made this impossible. Boris Pasternak dedicated himself to his writing, driven by a fierce belief that his artistic vision was right. His epic historical novel was smuggled out of the Soviet Union, and became an international sensation. Pasternak was forced to reject his Nobel Prize and faced condemnation at home until his untimely death.

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LENINGRAD SIEGE: WHEN POETRY AIDS IN SURVIVAL ence, as fallible human and as immortal creator. In these poems, Nabokov too reveals his creative strengths and his all-too-human weaknesses. about whether anything awful had happened to the family.

haunts both the Russian and the English parts of this anthology. Nabokov was a prolific translator and there are several poems that play on his bilingualism. In the brilliant“Evening of Russian Poetry,” the narrator talks about “customary” rhymes in Russian:“love automatically rhymes with blood, / nature with liberty, sadness with distance…” Poetic Nabokov at his best achieves a subtle sublimity. He explores the writand er’s dual conexistferences, as well as wo r k i n g a s a translator. He grew up in a household where his absent uncle was a constant presence, a figure he felt he knew intimately despite never directly communicating with him. His memories of the excitement when the family received a letter from abroad inspired him to translate and edit a collection of his uncle’s letters, published as“Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence, 1921-1960.” This correspondence with his relatives was the closest Boris Pasternak kept to a diary, and offers an insight into the mind of a man sustained by an unshakable inner confidence.

RR: How aware were they of the reality of life for Boris? NPS: He didn’t write about individual terrible things, writing in general terms such as “oh if you only knew everything, I can’t go on, I’d begin to howl.”They were aware that terrible things did happen, that people disappeared, that people were arrested and that these were things he couldn’t write about. So they were looking for hints and allusions, trying to unlock the code that he used. For instance when Vladimir Sillov was arrested and shot, Boris wrote that “he has died of the same illness as our late Liza’s husband, he thought too much and sometimes this leads to this kind of meningitis.” The family knew that the late Liza’s husband had been shot in 1918, and so this allusion to the ‘same illness’ was a clear indication of what had happened.

Read Russia: What originally prompted you to translate the correspondence between Boris Pasternak and his family? Nicolas Pasternak Slater: I had particularly vivid memories of my childhood and the great excitement that was generated in the household on the rare occasions when a letter would come from Russia. Just at the end of the war when I was seven years old, letters came which were smuggled through by English diplomats, and my mother would be very emotional about it. She would ring up her sister and they would discuss whether there were things left unsaid, and worry

RR: Tell us about her poetry. NPS: Her poems are very personal. They’re also very emotional, lyrical poems, about the landscape, about nature, about the sea. She was a very passionate person and she loved nature probably more than anything else. Her German poetry was as written when hen she worked in Munich. She was very popular with her ar w colleagues, who were alway always celebrating something; birthdays, hdays, new arrivals.... So these poems show her lighted-hearted earted sside. They’re quite ironical, quite sat satirical, and quite fun to read.

AS LENINGRAD SIFTED THROUGH THE RUBBLE AND BEGAN ITS LONG RECOVERY, PEOPLE WOULD THANK POET OLGA BERGGOLTS FOR HER POEMS ANNA AKHMATOVA WROTE ABOUT HER SURVIVOR’S GUILT BEFORE AND DURING THE WAR BERGGOLTS, LIKE AKHMATOVA, ENDURED MANY DARK DAYS EVEN BEFORE THE LENINGRAD SIEGE

Berggolts lived in the city during the blockade and broadcast her poems to bolster the populace. Knowing that she was on the other end of a microphone, barricaded like them, gave Leningraders something resembling hope. After all, amid shelling and starvation, she was still writing poems. And she would recite these poems, about the suffering, about the fear, about the horror of death, and the unbearable lives they were living. In a film called “Day Stars,” (Igor Talankin, 1968) Berggolts is depicted as reciting to soldiers: “Mother worries, grieves/ What should I write my distant mother?/ How to reassure her/to lie?” By the end of the poem, however, no fear, only reer, she shows s solve. e. Berggolts decides not to mother. Rather, she protect her mo decides ecides e tto ttell ll “the truth.” The poet, a charismatic beauty in her early thirties, broadcast her poems over the only radio station operating during the Siege. Her grave but mellifl fluous voice flowed straight into their homes e during one of the worst wartime ordeals for citizens in history, yet it is almost impossible to find her poems today in English. Berggolts was inspired red and influenced by revered y the already revere Anna Akhmatova, Akhmatova who also wrote poems from Leningrad and bore witness to the first artillery shelling of the city. rainbow of peoty.“A ra ple running around/And A suddenenly everything changed anged completely,” Akhmatova wrote. (The full ly

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO TUPOLEV TB-3 FLIGHTS, 1935

poem is included in Anna Akhmatova’s “Poems,” translated by Lyn Coffin with an introduction by Joseph Brodsky.) Many less famous women also acted as scribes for the city, keeping diaries and journals and writing poems, partly to save themselves from insanity. Tanya Savicheva, a child during the siege, witnessed the death of every member of her family, and her heartbreaking, telegraphic diary reads like a requiem: “Zhenya died on Dec, 28th at 12 p.m. 1941.…Uncle Lesha on May 10th at 4 p.m. 1942. Mother on May 13th at 7:30 a.m. 1942… Savichevs died. Everyone died. Only Tanya is left.” Berggolts, like Akhmatova, had endured many dark days before the Siege. She was pregnant when she was arrested by the secret service, and lost her child during interrogations in 1938. One of Akhmatova’s themes was her survivor’s guilt – she became, for Russia, their “Muse of Wailing.” Ye t B ro d s ky noted that in her poems about the dead, she was the most disciplined, and did the least “howling,” in their honour. Berggolts’ golts’ war w poems also showed po d an iincredible discipline, as if the most restrained voice was w needed. NORA FITZGERALD

RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES 14

ADVICE ON HOW TO ACT IN A CROWD FORGOTTEN SOVIET WRITER VARLAM SHALAMOV PORTRAYED THE GULAG IN THE SHARPEST RELIEF

HARD TIMES: THE TV SERIES LENIN’S LAST WILL WAS BASED ON SHALAMOV’S KOLYMA TALES

GEORGE BUTCHARD

SPEAKER, 1933

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO

WhenVarlam Shalamov rejected Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s offer to co-author “The Gulag Archipelago,”he sparked a conflict between the two on the question of whether suffering is redemptive and what role art should play in society. Varlam Shalamov, who survived 17 years in the same camp system, wrote as powerfully and brilliantly as Solzhenitsyn, and yet has garnered little recognition within Russia or abroad. Shalamov’s collection of short stories “Kolyma Tales” forms a complement to Solzhenitsyn’s work due to the writers’ contrasting styles and philosophies. This material is not for the fainthearted, with its unflinching presentation of the brutality of power and the range of human suffering. Shalamov wrote that “a writer must be a stranger in

the subjects he describes” and his work is defined by his direct, objective, presentation of suffering, with the detached gaze of his narrators serving to bring the subject matter into sharp relief. Each of the stories is self-contained, focusing on a different element of camp life, a specific event, or a personality. However, this thematic division masks a deeper artistic unity. For critic and translator Robert Chandler, “Kolyma Tales” is like a mosaic that has been shattered, and intentionally so, as if to exemplify the fact that the experience of the Gulag does shatter one’s world. Shalamov declined to collaborate with Solzhenitsyn in part because he was disinterested in an historical approach. He also claimed that “Solzhenitsyn is bogged down in the themes of nineteenth-century literature” eteenth century literature and d “all those who follow Tolstoy’s y’s precepts are cheaters.” He believed that “art has lost the right to preach” and seems to s u g g e s t through g his gh h writing w writ riting i that no greater good could emerge from the Gulag. S h a l a m o v ’s central question is what sustains and drives humans, giving us the capability to survive experiences such as the Kolyma camps. One of his narrators says that

“a human being survives by his is ability to forget, memory is allways ready to blot out the bad d and retain only the good” while e another, who stumbles on a chilldren’s picture, is moved by hap-pier childhood memories which h momentarily distract him from m his situation. Such bittersweet et moments punctuate the otherrwise bleak narratives. In the story y “Sententious,”the mere memory y of one word brings about unbriidled joy to a man whose languagee and memory have been all but ut crushed. Shalamov examines the no-tion that humans require more e than just survival on a physical al level, touching on the soul’s spirritual requirements through lines es such as “needing more than n bread,/I dip a crust of dry sky,/ ,/ in the morning chill,/in the stream flowing by.”In a series of notes“What I’ve seen and l e a r n e d a t Ko ly m a camps”Shalamov concluded that the“fragility of human nature, of civilization”is his most important lesson.

Varlam Shalamov consistently downplayed the profundity of his work, claiming “my stories are basically advice to a man on how to act in a crowd.”

Born: June 18, 1907, Vologda Died: January 17, 1982, Moscow Education: Moscow State University Occupation: Writer, journalist, poet Notable works: Kolyma Tales, Graphite Time spend in the Gulag: 1929-1931, 1937-1951

Notoriouss Sentences: Senten te enc nces: Allex Alexander Alex A exan an nde derr Solzhenitsyn Sollz So lz lzhenitsyn [writer]: e er r]: ]: Eight-year Eig ight-year igh ht term for making “derogatory comments” about “d Stalin. Varlam Shalamov [writer]: 10-year term for describing Bunin as a “classic Russian writer.” Vladimir Petrov [academic]: Sixyear term for “possession of counter-revolutionary literature” – diaries written when he was 16-years old. Nikolai Getman [artist]: Eightyear term for “participating in anti-Soviet propaganda” after drawing a caricature of Stalin on a cigarette packet.

PHOEBE PHO OEBE TAPLIN

Sib Siberian Education, a new film based on the memoirs of gangba ster-turned-gallery-owner, Nicoste lai Lilin and featuring John Malkovich, premiered at this year’s Berlinale film festival and received positive trade reviews. Lilin is a bestselling author in Italy, where he now lives, but is not well known otherwise and remains unpublished in his native Russia, where his work has been met with some skepticism.

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A VISCERAL VOICE, WRITING FOR THOSE WHO CAN’T SADULAEV’S FLAWED BUT IMPORTANT BOOK “I AM A CHECHEN” TELLS US TRUTHS WE NEED TO HEAR PHOEBE TAPLIN

There are many things wrong with “I am a Chechen” as a nove novel. ve el. l. There is barely anyone nyo yon ne e who could really be de deescribed as a character, racterr, apart from fleeting eeting cameos by murdered rdered friends and childhood hood memories. German Sadulaev’s fragmented meditation on war, identity and rootlessness is an uneasy mixture of fictionalised memoir and painful lament. The style is also unreliable, veering wildly between brutal war-time horrors, purple passages of swallows and wildflowers, and historical background inforan mation. The self-conscious dema scriptions of the Chechen landscr scape are embarrassingly full of sca phrases like “the breast of our ph

motherland”and overm extended metaphors ex involving “the scarlet in cow of the sun” wanco dering into the “blue de pasture of the sky.” pa Despite these caveats, ats this is an important tan and sometimes moving book. mo The underreported war between b Russia and Chechnya needs storytellers who are not serving“either side’s propaganda system,” both of which foster an image of “the Chechen as an enemy of Russia.” Sadulaev was born in the Chechen village of

THERE IS A FINE TRADITION OF RUSSIAN WRITERS, INCLUDING LERMONTOV AND PUSHKIN, WHO CELEBRATE BEAUTY AND BRAVERY IN THE CAUCASUS GERMAN SADULAEV IS A PRACTICING LAWYER, BUT HE DOES NOT WRITE DISPASSIONATELY WHEN IT COMES TO CHECHNYA, HIS HOME

Shali and moved to Leningrad in 1989 to study law. He still works as a lawyer, but his personal connections with Chechnya

SIBERIAN EDUCATION: FACT OR FANTASY? S “SIBERIAN EDUCATION” AND “FREE FALL” BY NICOLAI LILIN ATTRACT BOTH FANS AND SCATHING CRITICS

NICOLAI LILIN ACKNOWLEDGED THAT HE WRITES STORIES CONTAINING BOTH “TRUE DETAILS” AND “IMAGINATIVE RECREATION”

He was born in 1980 in the Soviet Union and grew up in Transnistria, a disputed area on the Moldovan border with Ukraine.“Siberian Education”is loosely based on his early experiences. The English version of the book describes itself as a“memoir,”but adds an “author’s note” to clarify: “Certain episodes are imaginative recreation, and those episodes are not intended to portray

actual events.” If the reader accepts this premise, the question becomes simply “is it any good?” Comparisons with Rushdie definitely set the bar far too high in stylistic and intellectual terms, but Lilin’s story is not without interest. The most engaging sections include scenes in “Aunt Katya’s restaurant,” where exconvicts share cigarettes and play with hand-painted cards as they did in prison. Tattoos are a lifelong passion: Lilin’s real-life art gallery in Milan recently hosted an exhibition of Siberian tattoos. The chapter “When the Skin Speaks”lovingly outlines the secret, coded languages of criminal tattoos, galaxies of violent and religious images intertwined across the whole body. These scenes make a nice contrast with the narrator’s obsessive descriptions of weapons or the horrors of juvenile prison. Most objected to Lilin’s book on grounds of accuracy rather than its cham-

pioning of a culture of violence, misogyny and homophobia. Lilin’s second instalment“Free Fall”(a soldier’s tale from Chechnya) is less authoritative than Arkady Babchenko’s “One Soldier’s War”in Chechnya, less compelling than German Sadulaev’s flawed, but lyrical“I Am a Chechen”and far less well-written than Andrei Gelasimov’s subtle novella, “Thirst.” Lilin’s disclaimer is carefully worded: “I created a composite narrator whose experiences combine those of many of my friends…” But this sequel lacks the charm and humanity of “Siberian Education.” Lilin’s aim in“Free Fall: A Sniper’s Story,”is to bring the horrors of a brutal conflict to an indifferent audience. Whether his philosophical moments justify the chaotic assault of the preceding 350 pages is still open to debate, as is the vexed question of whether Lilin’s books should be treated as fact, fantasy or mutant hybrid.

make it impossible to write dispassionately. He challenges the reader in the novel itself, writing, “I know: it is disjointed, sketchy… There is no central plot. It is hard to read prose like this, right?” The visceral nature of Sadulaev’s stream-of-consciousness is as much strength as weakness. The reader is caught up in an emotional outpouring, which editing might have rendered distant or clinical. In his novel, he compares his own writing to “spurts of blood” or to the cluster bombs, banned by the Geneva Convention, whose flechettes embed themselves in the heart of the girl next door. Sadulaev compares the documented cases of post-Vietnam suicides with the unnumbered young men in Russia who have killed themselves after active service in Chechnya.“And these were the best of soldiers,” he writes. “We have to conquer evil, to rise above hatred.” There is a fine tradition of Russian writers, including Lermontov and Pushkin, who celebrate the beauty and bravery of the Caucasus. Among recent accounts of the battle-torn region, Arkady Babchenko’s “One Soldier’s War” is the outstanding example. A glimpse of the Chechen perspective is a rarity, especially in English. Sadulaev has seen friends and family perish in a brutal conflict. He is wracked with guilt about not having been there: “I should have died.”But the friends that died will never get to write about it;“that’s why I … - the one who remains – write this book.”

RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES

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16 1. VAPNYAR’S COLLECTION OF STORIES, “THERE ARE JEWS IN MY HOUSE,” WAS PUBLISHED (PANTHEON BOOKS) IN 2003. 2. “MEMOIRS OF A MUSE,” HER FIRST NOVEL, WAS PUBLISHED IN 2006 AND TRANSLATED INTO RUSSIAN IN 2012.

3. THE COLLECTION OF STORIES CALLED “BROCCOLI AND OTHER TALES OF FOOD AND LOVE” WAS PUBLISHED IN 2008.

LARA VAPNYAR AND HER RUNAWAY SUCCESS STRUGGLING WRITERS FIND IT DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE HOW THE AUTHOR’S FICTION WAS PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORKER SHORTLY AFTER SHE LEARNED ENGLISH

XENIA GRUBSTEIN

Lara Vapnyar spoke hardly any English when she emigrated to the United States at the age of 23, in 1994, when she was three months’ pregnant. She had the idea when she came to America she would get a “wonderful, exciting, amazing job,” she said in a video interview, adding, that she “couldn’t find any job… I started writing by accident.” Right away, Vapynar began to

write in English — a language she was still learning. Her English quickly became lyrical, and she realised she was a natural storyteller. She began writing about the Russian Jewish émigrés she knew. As a young girl, Vapnyar dreamed of becoming either an actress or an adventurer. Life as a young émigré and new mother was hard work, but writing as

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO RHYTHMIC GYMNASTICS, 1936

“therapy”turned out to be much more promising than she had imagined. She studied international literature at the City University of New York. Her professor, Louis Menand, a staff writer for The New Yorker, noticed her literary talent and asked if he could show one of her stories to the magazine’s editors. That first story was never published, but the top editors at the illustrious magazine were intrigued. The New Yorker published her next short story,“Love

soft spot for her Russian readers. When she first found out that she was published in Russian,“It was like coming back to my childhood, a very warm and touching feeling.”Also, criticism from Russians stings more, she said, “because I’m still Russian, so Russians’ opinion is that of someone close, and particularly significant”. Yet the author doesn’t visit Russia very often. Over the last two decades she’s visited only twice, both times for work.“Last time was interesting, because I

Lessons Mondays, 9A.M., about a young teacher charged with a sex education class in Moscow, on June 13, 2003. “I had no clue what The New Yorker was,”Vapnyar laughed in an interview with RBTH.“I only realised retrospectively how important this was for me. Since I didn’t know what it was [The New Yorker], I wasn’t even worried – okay, someone’s going to read my story, big deal,” said the pretty brunette with deep dark eyes and a bit of a shy smile. While she appreciates all of her readers, Vapnyar said she has a

“I LEARNED ENGLISH WATCHING “PRETTY WOMAN.” I SAW IT SO MANY TIMES, UNTIL I UNDERSTOOD EVERY BIT OF CONVERSATION. IT WAS 17 YEARS AGO, SO I OWE GARRY MARSHALL BIG FOR MY ENGLISH,” VAPNYAR CONFESSED

went there as an American writer, representing the US Department of State,” Lara recalled. Currently, she is writing a new novel called “Secrets of Staten Island.”Vapnyar also teaches creative writing at New York University and Columbia University. The author said she sometimes worries that in general people have stopped reading or at least slowed down. She’s grateful for her own readership:“I hope they read my stories not because they are wondering whether we are

eating Russian salad for New Year’s Eve, but because of some deeper things, such as, what people feel, how they fall in love, and how they fall out of love.”