I took a break last week after a rather bloody incident involving
a grater, a chunk of Pineland sharp
cheddar cheese, and a middle finger. Now that I’m back to full typing
capacity, despite an occasional twinge in the finger, here’s a jumble of a post
to get me caught up…
I’ll admit that last week I was more than happy to
procrastinate writing about Sergei
Nosov’s Грачи улетели (The Rooks Have Flown/Left/Gone): in keeping with the jumble theme, The Rooks is a nearly indescribable jumble
of characters, places, and motifs. Nosov tells the story of three old friends—a
teacher, a typewriter repairman and watchman, and a former flyswatter salesman
and would-be artist(e)—in three non-chronological sections. Much of the book is
set in St. Petersburg, which lends itself to some nice passages about changing
names and times. And references to Dostoevsky. And peeing off a bridge.
I thought The Rooks
worked particularly well when Nosov examined contemporary art—one of his characters
makes a wonderful trip to the Hermitage and stares in the abyss of Malevich’s glassed-in
Black Square—and the fine lines
between art and life. The section set in Germany, where the flyswatter salesman
and would-be artist lives for a time and hosts the other two for a painful visit,
felt less successful because it felt, simply, too long. Despite some structural
misgivings, Nosov won me over with atmosphere, love for St. Petersburg, and a tone
that avoids the cloying and preciousness thanks, in large part, to tart commentary
on contemporary art and culture. The epilogue contains developments that brought
varying degrees of surprise and showed how little we may know our friends and
literary characters. It also cemented my interpretation of the book’s title as
a reference to fall, playing off the name of Aleksei Savrasov’s painting of rooks
that have returned in spring.
Iurii Trifonov’s Обмен (The Exchange) is a lovely jumble, too, a long story about family
that blends past and present, private and public: Trifonov focuses on Viktor
Dmitriev, whose wife Lena wants to arrange an apartment exchange so they (and
their daughter) can live with Dmitriev’s mother, Ksenia, who is horribly ill. The
description
of The Exchange in Neil Cornwall
and Nicole Christian’s
Reference Guide to
Russian Literature is so good and detailed (even if it’s cut off!) that I’ll
just focus on impressions. I think what struck me most about
The Exchange was the grayness of
Dmitriev’s Soviet-era existence: his daily routine, his past affair with a
co-worker he thinks would have made a better wife than Lena, and, of course, disappointment.
Everything is beautifully observed and described though I find this sort of quiet—or
perhaps muted and repressed?—desperation even sadder than the harsher chernukha
of the post-Soviet era. I mean that as a statement of respect rather than a
criticism. Particularly since I have to think there’s a reason Trifonov chose
to include that cesspool.
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| Oxford from the air... must get up early enough to see city before coven... |
On another note, I’m very excited about
Translators’
Coven: Fresh Approaches to Literary Translation from Russian, a weekend
workshop I’ll be attending at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, next month. I’ll be
chairing a roundtable discussion about publishing and translations, and
speaking on a panel about translating dialogue in drama. The week after the
workshop, there will be a series of events about poetry translation at
Pushkin House in London. A huge thank
you to Oliver Ready and Robert Chandler for organizing all this. It’s a
wonderful chance to learn and get caught up with London-based colleagues. I can’t
wait!
Speaking of which… Pushkin House launched a new book award, the
Pushkin House Russian
Book Prize, “to further public understanding of the Russian-speaking world,
by encouraging and rewarding the very best non-fiction writing on Russia, and
promoting serious discussion on the issues raised.” I’m always vowing (and, generally,
failing) to read more (okay,
any!) book-length
nonfiction that complements my fiction reading, so the
Pushkin
House Russian Book Prize short list, which covers a wonderfully broad
assortment of topics, is a convenient place to start looking for candidates:
- Anne Applebaum: The Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern
Europe 1944-1956
- Masha Gessen: Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of
Vladimir Putin
- Thane Gustafson: Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and
Fortune in Russia
- Donald J. Raleigh:
Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of
Russia’s Post War Generation
- Karl Schlögel: Moscow, 1937
- Douglas Smith: Former People: The Last Days of Russia’s
Aristocracy
Reading Levels for
Non-Native Readers of Russian: Medium for both the Nosov and Trifonov
books.
Up Next: A
novella (or two?) by Victor Pelevin.
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