Farewell to Vladimir Makanin

I was very sad to learn that writer Vladimir Makanin died last week. I enjoyed Makanin’s stories and fiction enough that I listed him first in my “Russian Writers A to Я” post for the letter “M.” Here’s what I wrote about Makanin and his work back in that 2011 post:

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.

There’s not much that I wrote then that I’d change now, though I do want to add that one of the reasons I started writing this blog ten years ago is that I found so little English-language material about Makanin on the Internet. Makanin left a large body of work: I have several collections that I’ve barely touched and am particularly looking forward to reading more of his early work. It felt fitting that the shelf holding his books caught my eye—thanks to his Asan—in the World Languages section of the Boston Public Library when I visited yesterday with my brother, who also thoroughly enjoyed Escape Hatch and The Long Road Ahead.