The 2018 Yasnaya Polyana Award Longlist

The contemporary fiction longlist for this year’s Yasnaya Polyana Award contains 43 books, many of which have mercifully brief and translatable titles, something that’s always a plus for this reporter. Late-breaking: I discovered, just as I was finishing up this post, that Yasnaya Polyana posted an English-language translation of this entire list.

Since this year’s longlist truly is long and there’s plenty to mention, I’ll get right to it, listing, in Russian alphabetical order, some books I’ve read, several notable books, plus a few books by authors whose names are new to me (marked with asterisks). I can’t say there are any unfamiliar titles that jumped out and begged me to read them, though I can be a bit slow on the uptake with book descriptions, many of which are (annoyingly) cryptic at best. In any case, the shortlist will be announced in September.

• Vasily Aksyonov’s Была бы дочь Анастасия (Perhaps If There Were a Daughter Anastasia? YP goes for If Only There Had Been a Daughter Anastasia) was a 2018 NatsBest finalist. About nature in Siberia.
• Yana Vagner’s Кто не спрятался (Accomplices) is a hermetic murder mystery set in a European mountain house/hotel. The flashbacks did me in because they broke the novel’s tension, but I give Vagner credit for her cast of rather annoying film industry characters, their spouses, and their problems.
• Sana Valiulina’s Не боюсь Синей Бороды (I’m Not Afraid of Bluebeard a.k.a. Children of Brezhnev) contains some lovely description and atmosphere but it didn’t quite grab me. I liked the rhythm of the writing, though, so I set it aside to try again later.
• Marina Vishnevetskaya’s Вечная жизнь Лизы К. (literally The Eternal Life of Liza K.) also wasn’t quite my thing, with, among other things, its blend of love story, office plankton, political demonstrations, and (the final straw) an appearance by SpongeBob SquarePants. A friend enjoyed this one so I was especially disappointed not to.
• Oleg Yermakov’s Радуга и Вереск (Rainbow and Heather, maybe? SeeLanguagehat’s comments on a previous post) is a Big Book finalist that sounds like it combines multiple stories, one set in the seventeenth century, the other in 2015.
• *Marina Kudimova’s Бустрофедон (Boustrophedon) makes me curious because of its title… I never knew “boustrophedon” was either a phenomenon or a word. Anyway, this looks like it’s about contemporary life.
• Sergei Kuznetsov’s Учитель Дымов (Teacher Dymov) is a low-key family saga sort of novel that I read ages ago and enjoyed very much. I really will post about it soon!
• *Marina Kulakova’s Столетник Марии и Анны (Maria and Anna’s Agave/Century Plant) is about three generations of women.
• *Natalya Melyokhina’s Железные люди (People of Iron/Iron People) looks like a collection of short stories about a village after perestroika.
• *Bolat Ospanov’s Мой прадед-найман (My Great-Grandfather the Naiman) sounds like a family history/saga novel wet in Mongolia.
• Ludmila Petrushevskaya’s Нас украли. История преступлений. (Kidnapped. The History of Crimes) sounds packed with all sorts of contemporary material, too; I keep meaning to get this one because I enjoyed Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night so much and she so rarely writes novels!
• Aleksei Sal’nikov’s Петровы в гриппе и вокруг него (The Petrovs in Various States of the Flu) won this year’s NatsBest plus the literary critic panel’s NOS(E) Award. I found it a bit underwhelming, though want to try it again now that it’s out in print form.
• Olga Slavnikova’s Прыжок в длину (Long Jump), another Big Book finalist, is about an athlete who loses his lower extremities in an accident. I read a large chunk of Long Jump and set it aside—the dense metaphors can get a bit exhausting—but definitely plan to finish.
• Maria Stepanova’s Памяти памяти (In Memory of Memory, to borrow LARB’s title translation) is another Big Book finalist; this one’s about cultural history, family history, and (of course) memory.
• Andrei Filimonov’s Рецепты сотворения мир (Recipes for the Creation of the World), also a Big Book finalist, is so nicely summarized in Galina Yuzefovich’s review for Meduza, translated by Hilah Kohen, that I’ll leave the description to them.
• *Aleksei Shepelev’s Мир-село и его обитатели (The Village of Mir and Its Inhabitants) is apparently about modern-day peasants in the Tambov region. (Tangent: I can’t hear “Tambov” without thinking of this odd earworm of a song from my Moscow years… Warning: click at your own risk.)
• Sasha Shchipin’s Бог с нами (God Is With Us) concerns the end of the world but wasn’t quite compelling enough to keep me reading, though it’s certainly very genial.
• Lena Eltang’s Царь велел тебя повесить (The Tsar Ordered Your Hanging) sounds very good, not to mention complex, apparently focusing on a man who’s been imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit; he writes letters home from jail.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: Not much other than the usual and that I have received several books on the list, in either print or electronic form, and have translated/am translating work by Eltang and Kuznetsov.

Up Next: From my constantly growing (and groaning) “write about” shelf: I think I’ll start with a short story roundup, move on to the Vladimir Makanin novella and a creepy long story by Yelizaveta Alexandrova-Zorina, then finish things off with full-length novels, those being Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M. (I’m already waiting for the sequel!), and Vladimir Sharov’s The Rehearsals in Oliver Ready’s translation.