BookExpo America 2011: Odds & Ends on Russian Books & Programs

I always seem to enjoy BookExpo America, but this year’s BEA was particularly fun thanks to increased interest in Russian literature: Russia will be the Global Market Forum country in 2012. A brief summary of a press conference about Global Market Forum, posted by BEA director Steve Rosato, mentions plans to bring more than 40 Russian writers to New York. Needless to say, I can’t wait!

This year’s BEA program included two Russian programs that covered, among other things, a bilingual reading from 2017 with Olga Slavnikova and Marian Schwartz, who translated the book for Overlook, plus an introduction to four writers – Irina Bogatyreva, Polina Kliukina, Pavel Kostin, and Andrei Kuzechkin – who were Debut Prize winners or nominees. Kostin and Kuzechkin’s Rooftop Anesthesia and Mendeleev Rock, respectively, were published, in Andrew Bromfield’s translation, by Glas in 2011, and three of Kliukina’s stories, in Anne O. Fisher’s translation, are in the Squaring the Circle anthology, also from Glas.

2011 releases of newly translated Russian books from American publishers include, listed by publication date:

Twelve Who Don’t Agree, by Valery Panyushkin, translated by Marian Schwartz, due out July 16, from Europa Editions. For a taste of Panyushkin, try the recent New York Times piece “Was It Something I Wrote?” I’m looking forward to reading Twelve.

Apricot Jam, a story collection by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by ? (I’ll see if I can get the name and add it), due out in September, from Counterpoint. (PDF catalogue) Since Counterpoint’s description refers to the eight stories, written in the 1990s, as “paired,” I’m figuring they’ve preserved (no pun intended) the Apricot Jam story cycle presented in this Azbuka-klassika Russian edition and a book on my shelf.

Thirst, a novel by Andrei Gelasimov, translated by Marian Schwartz, due out November 22, , from Amazon Crossing. I read and enjoyed Thirst years ago, before I started blogging, and was interested to see that Amazon Crossing will be publishing several other Gelasimov books.

The Letter Killers Club, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull, due out December 6, from New York Review Books. This is a great incentive for me to finally read some Krzhizhanovsky. NYRB also has more Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov on the way, in the more distant future.

I’ll be writing more about these books later this year. [Edit: A previous post covers other translation releases for 2011.]

One other note: I finished out my four days in New York with an unexpected visit to the Chelsea Art Museum for a fantastic exhibit: Concerning the Spiritual Tradition in Russian Art: Selections from the Kolodzei Art Foundation. I spent several hours at the museum with Tatiana and Natalia Kolodzei, who gave me a personal tour of the exhibit. If you’re in the New York area, I highly recommend a visit. The exhibit closes June 11; Natalia will offer a gallery talk on June 11 at 4 p.m.

That’s it for today. I’ll be back tomorrow with a brief post on the winner of the NatsBest.

Up Next: The 2011 NatsBest winner, then Vsevolod Benigsen’s ГенАцид (GenAcide). I’m looking forward to getting back to my usual reading pace after a spring of colds and wonderful but exhausting travel.

Disclaimers: The usual. I’ve discussed translated fiction with all the publishers named in this post.

Notable Newish Translations: A Few Favorites from Life Stories

Ah, short story anthologies! I read the Life Stories collection much like I read Rasskazy last fall: sporadically, out of order, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in English, depending on Internet availability of originals. And I didn’t finish every story. The two books have only one writer in common, Zakhar Prilepin.

Life Stories is more difficult to characterize than Rasskazy, which includes only writers with post-Soviet adulthoods. Life Stories encompasses writers of all ages, many of whom – Pelevin, Makanin, Rubina, and Yuzefovich, among them – are bestsellers and/or winners of large prizes. Plus the content of Life Stories was dictated by a Russian story collection that came out last year: Книга, ради которой объединилилсь писатели, объединить невозможно (roughly: A Book for the Sake of Which Writers Who’d Never Get Together Got Together). Though Life Stories doesn’t translate everything in its Russian predecessor because of copyright, it, like the Russian original, benefits the Vera Hospice Charity Fund and hospice care in Moscow.

Though I enjoyed more in Life Stories than in Rasskazy, I had more of a feeling of discovery reading Rasskazy. I already knew most of the writers in Life Stories, with the exception of Khurgin (see below), but I hadn’t read the majority of the writers in Rasskazy. I especially like finding new writers in anthologies.

I could generalize about which collection has more accomplished or risky or personal or intriguing or important stories, but that’s not fair to you or the stories themselves… both books contain stories that are accomplished, risky, personal, intriguing, and important. And tastes differ. What’s most important is that the two books complement each other, creating a wonderfully compact picture of Russian contemporary fiction that’s awfully fun to read.

There was a lot to like in Life Stories. Here’s what I liked most:

I began and ended Life Stories with Zakhar Prilepin’s “Grandmother, Wasps, Watermelon” (“Бабушка, осы, арбуз”) – I reread it because it didn’t feel right to comment on a story I read four months ago. The story felt even truer the second time, showing gender and ethnic divides during potato harvest, and then a return to a childhood place. I think Prilepin’s great strengths are his spare writing style and his ability to balance so confidently on the edge of sentimentality and brutality. (Translated by Deborah Hoffman.)

I met one new writer in Life Stories: Alexander Khurgin, whose “Earplugs” (“Беруши”) tells the story of a woman who “жила красотой мира и окружающей среды обитания” – “lived by the beauty of the world and of her environmental habitat.” Nelya’s life changes when a co-worker suggests she use earplugs to drown out the neighbors’ noise. I was glad to “find” Khurgin: both his narrative voice and his characters are quirky but not irritatingly so. (Translated by Anne O. Fisher.)

Vladimir Sorokin’s “Black Horse with a White Eye” (“Черная лошадь с белым глазом”) held a nice combination of motifs: the story combines a family scything outing with folk themes when a young girl wanders into the woods to pick berries. She is told not to go far, a signal that something will happen. The story includes bits of accented Russian dialogue, some of which is rendered into English with a rather (too) southern twang. (Translated by Deborah Hoffman.)

Evgenii Grishkovets’s “Serenity” (“Спокойствие”) is typical Grishkovets: an easy-to-read story with insights into human behavior. Though Grishkovets’s stories always feel a little slight to me, this one, like several others, was easy to identify with: its main character stays in the city for the summer, taking it easy while everyone else is away for vacation. Any character who prefers reading over mushroom picking gets some points from me. I’m sure Grishkovets sells so many books because of his relentless позитив (positiveness). (Translated by Paul E. Richardson.)

I already mentioned another favorite, Leonid Yuzefovich’s “Гроза” (“The Storm”), translated by Marian Schwartz, in this post, and I covered Andrei Gelasimov’s story “Жанна” (“Joan”), translated by Alexei Bayer, here.

Disclosure: Russian Information Services provided me with a copy of Life Stories. (I bought another copy of the book as a holiday gift.)

All posts on Life Stories (published by Russian Information Services)

All posts on Rasskazy (published by Tin House)

Life Stories on Amazon

Rasskazy on Amazon

Gelasimov Takes NatsBest

Fontanka.ru reports that Andrei Gelasimov’s novel Степные боги (Steppe Gods) won the 2009 National Bestseller literary award. I’m a little surprised it won: beyond the fact that I found Steppe Gods disappointing, German Sadulaev’s Таблетка (The Tablet) won the most votes in the previous round of voting. (Previous posts: Steppe Gods and NatsBest short list)

In other NatsBest news, bloggers on Живой Журнал (Live Journal) gave their best book vote to Sergei Nosov’s Тайная жизнь Петербургских памятников (The Secret Life of Petersburg Monuments). They also awarded the new NatsWorst prize to Vladimir Makanin’s Асан (Asan). (Previous post on Asan)

I’m about to start Il’ia Boiashov’s Танкист, или «Белый тигр» (The Tank Driver or “White Tiger”), which was shortlisted for NatsBest, Booker, and Big Book… but didn’t win any of them. The Tank Driver is a thin volume that looks particularly inviting thanks to remedial material: a diagram of a T-34-85 tank on the endpapers and background on World War 2 in readable commentaries by Boiashov.

Edit: Here's a commentary from lenta.ru about Gelasimov's win: "Победа 'приятного писателя'"

Gelasimov’s “Steppe Gods”

Andrei Gelasimov’s Степные боги (Steppe Gods) is a short and disappointing coming-of-age novel set in the steppe beyond Lake Baikal in 1945, shortly before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The novel gets off to a decent start. A boy named Pet’ka, who likes to play war, rescues a baby wolf that he names Испуг (Fear). He hides the cub near his grandmother’s goat herd.

Pet’ka lives near a camp housing Japanese prisoners of war captured at Khalkhin Gol. Among the prisoners is an herbalist of samurai stock who keeps a diary for his sons in Nagasaki. Pet’ka likes to visit the camp, where officers ease his loneliness with talk and his hunger with kasha and canned meat. Pet’ka is often teased because he is illegitimate, and he seems to be at war with many of the boys in his village. They even try to hang him at one point.

Gelasimov’s handling of Pet’ka’s family status was my first indication that Steppe Gods wouldn’t fulfill its potential. Did Gelasimov really need to repeat so much swearing [edit: words with vulgar roots]? The vulgar бля- (blia-) root, basically “whore,” for example, appears nearly 30 times, often in a “son of a” variant used to describe Pet’ka. I know all these words and they certainly don’t make me flinch – I used to hear the simplest of them used like punctuation all the time in Moscow – but I think they lose their effect because Gelasimov puts them in characters’ mouths far too often. I’m not sure if he wants the reader to remember Pet’ka’s origins, stress the low level of culture in the village, or both. Either way, I got the point. One of Pet’ka’s nastiest accusers is a woman who sleeps with officers while her husband is at war. Pet’ka gets revenge by spattering her with kasha.

I’m not sure why, but all these difficult conditions at the end of the war – hunger, infidelity, loneliness, physical and emotional abuse – don’t quite mesh with the parts of Gelasimov’s narrative that reflect Pet’ka’s thoughts. They sound convincing [disclosure: I lack a Y chromosome] and almost nostalgically childlike despite the suffering. I read Steppe Gods to the end because I wondered where the uneasy tension of childhood and abuse were going. Imagine my surprise when the last pages brought a Hollywoodesque, feel-good, new-agey ending that found multicultural common ground between the politically incorrect Pet’ka and the very kind Japanese prisoner!

The ending drew together larks, wolves, and rituals that conjure up the gods of the title, desperately resurrecting occasional motifs that hadn’t exactly dominated the previous 130 pages. The baby wolf, for example, had dropped out of the book for dozens of pages. A one-page epilogue described subsequent events that extended until 1963. [Note to writers of all nationalities: epilogues that tie up all loose plot ends are usually superfluous.]

I’ve enjoyed some of Gelasimov’s other fiction – “Жанна” (“Joan”) and Год обмана (The Year of the Lie) are very decent contemporary literary fiction – so I was surprised to dislike Steppe Gods so much. At least I’m not alone: plenty of readers on the Runet seem to have found Steppe Gods equally unsatisfying. I can’t help but agree with critic Lev Pirogov, who writes that the book reads as if it were written for the movies. Pirogov and another reader also allude to the book’s violence, and bad behavior, which they think meet the demands of readers seeking grit that feels realistic. For me, the problem with Steppe Gods isn’t the inclusion of all these unpleasant details. It’s the absence of a deeper feel for what they all mean.

P.S. Oops, I forgot to mention that Steppe Gods was shortlisted for the National Bestseller award. (previous post)

A Bright Spot or a Dark Cloud?: Andrei Gelasimov’s “Zhanna”

Are you an optimist or pessimist? If you’re not sure, try reading Andrei Gelasimov’s short story “Жанна” – “Zhanna” transliterated but “Joan” in this translation.

One Russian site hosting the story includes comments from readers and Gelasimov himself, who writes that people find either optimism and light or darkness and Satanism in the story. Gelasimov concludes that it’s not the story that causes the polarization but readers themselves, who interpret the story’s problems from their own perspectives.

A first-person narration about a teenage mother’s life with her disabled son does indeed sound quite gloomy, but Gelasimov infuses both his heroine and his story with a subtle sense of hope.

“Zhanna” is written in a stripped-down style that doesn’t overload the reader’s senses with superfluous emotion, imagery, or pop culture references: Gelasimov includes just enough of these details to unify the narrative. Zhanna tells her story as an actual teenage girl might, jumping between doctor appointments, her mother’s dreams of France, childhood memories, and her son’s difficulties. Her life and troubles feel quite real and, though I don’t often like a flat-sounding narrative voice, this one fits the character.

This English translation by Alexei Bayer captures the mood and simplicity of the Russian original quite nicely. Though I find the choice of “Joan” instead of “Zhanna” for the narrator’s name somewhat curious, I suspect “Joan” makes the story feel more universal to non-Russian readers. Incidentally, the story mentions a song about a stewardess: it is “Стюардесса по имени Жанна” (“A Stewardess Named Zhanna”), Vladimir Presniakov’s irritatingly catchy perestroika-era pop hit. (Bonus link! Presniakov singing the song on YouTube.)

I wish I could list other works by Gelasimov that have been translated into English, but I don’t know of any. I enjoyed Gelasimov’s novel Год обмана (The Year of the Lie) very much, particularly a section of diary entries that were published separately as “Нежный возраст” (“The Sensitive Age”). The novel blends genres – coming of age, action – with humor and observations about life and lies, creating a satisfying and touching picture of one contemporary Russian family’s quirky life. On Proza.ru, Gelasimov recommends The Year of the Lie as a fun text and “Zhanna” for its sincerity. I concur.

A Related Reading. Thematically, “Zhanna” reminded me a bit of a novella by Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Время ночь (The Time: Night), a first-person narrative about three generations of dysfunctional family problems. Both stories have also been read in theaters as solo shows. Although I recommend The Time: Night as a look at societal breakdown in the late Soviet period, it takes a hysterical tone and feels claustrophobic, contrasting with Zhanna’s even tone and emptying apartment. Both narrators feel authentic, but I’d much rather spend a day with Zhanna’s quiet struggle than Anna’s shouting.