Yasnaya Polyana Award Winners for 2020

The Yasnaya Polyana Award announced its 2020 winners yesterday at an in-person ceremony in Moscow. I watched chunks of it (two and a half hours was more than a bit much, even for me!) on YouTube; it’s archived here on the Yasnaya Polyana site along with descriptions of each winner.

The winning book in the contemporary prose category was Evgeny Chizhov for Собиратель рая (a title I still can’t decide how best to translate: Collector of Heaven? Collecting Heaven? Perhaps something with “paradise”?). As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a slow-moving, good-natured book about a woman with dementia and her son, a flea market fan. I read about half; Collector felt almost anticlimactic for me after Chizhov’s The Translation (previous post), which I found so much more compelling, lively, and spirited. That’s not to say I don’t understand Collector’s appeal – I most certainly do – but it’s just not my book.

The reader’s choice prize went to Sasha Filipenko for Возвращение в Острог (Return to Ostrog, where “Ostrog” is apparently a toponym; the word means “prison”). Filipenko won 71.5% of the vote; voting was rather theatrically stopped (on a Samsung device since Samsung is the award sponsor) during the ceremony itself. I haven’t yet read Ostrog but am very interested. The reader award runner-up was Andrei Astvatsaturov’s Don’t Feed or Touch the Pelicans, with 8.3% of the vote.

Two other awards were presented. The “event of the year” was Vremya’s publication of a thick collection of works by Oleg Pavlov, who died in 2018; the book is introduced by a series of writers’ remembrances of Pavlov. Last but definitely not least: the foreign literature award, for a translation, went to Alexandra Borisenko and Viktor Sonkin’s translation of Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry for publishing house Sindbad.

Disclaimers & Disclosures: The usual, for being acquainted with some of the writers, translators, publishers, and jurors involved with events and books in this post.

Up Next: Inga Kuznetsova’s Intervals, finally!

Happy New Year! & 2018 Highlights

Happy New Year! С Новым годом! Wherever you are, whenever you read this, I hope the holidays have been enjoyable and I wish you lots of good reading in 2019!

Reading in 2018 followed the same pattern as the last several years, with good novels to translate but a dearth of satisfying new books to read. Although I don’t track the numbers, I’m certain I abandoned far more books than I finished. Despite that – and far too many pieces of sad news – there were some nice reading surprises this year, plus great travel and even some positive developments on the translation side of things. Here are some highlights:

Favorite book by a new author: One of my favorite reading highlights this year was Grigory Sluzhitel’s Дни Савелия (literally Savely’s Days) (previous post), which came highly recommended by Eugene Vodolazkin. Savely slinked his way into my heart thanks to his penchant for valerian, love for traipsing around Moscow, and smooth way with words. Savely’s Days would have been a favorite even in a good year but in this lackluster reading year, the book particularly stood out for its observations of people, cats, and Moscow.

Most enjoyable books written by authors I’d already read: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Учитель Дымов (Teacher Dymov), which, oddly enough, I haven’t written about, is a sort of ensemble family saga novel, a book where characters, psychology, and the little things in life are the focus, (generally) leaving historical crises of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras in the background. The book is vivid and detailed as it flows from generation to generation and it kept me up late reading. I also enjoyed Yulia Yakovleva’s Укрощение красного коня (Taming the Red Horse) (previous post), an atmospheric retro detective novel that plays with genre.

An unexpected achievement: I finally read and finished a Strugatsky Brothers novel, Град обреченный (available in English as Andrew Bromfield’s The Doomed City, Chicago Review Press) (previous post) in Russian! There are plenty of thoroughly repellant characters in the novel but it’s, hmm, intriguing in its own odd way so kept me reading and then thinking, too, as did Eduard Verkin’s Остров Сахалин (Sakhalin Island) (previous post), which got under my skin like some sort of stubborn rash or parasite. (Verkin’s Sakhalin still won’t quite let me go so I was glad that a visiting Russian friend had just read it, too, so we could talk.)

Favorite English-language reading: I seem to have read a higher percentage of satisfying books in English this year than in Russian: Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M. is the start of a big, thick novel about a young woman who comes of age at the time of the October Revolution. I also loved Curzio Malaparte’s The Kremlin Ball, translated by Jenny McPhee, a piece of writing (fiction? nonfiction? both? does it matter?) about Moscow in the late 1920s. (previous post on both) Another good one: Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s Городские и деревенские, known in Nora Seligman Favorov’s very pleasant English translation as City Folk and Country Folk. I described the book in a previous post as “a fun, smart nineteenth-century novel.”

Speaking of translations: I was very pleasantly surprised to find that this year’s list of Russian-to-English translations topped sixty entries (previous post). There’s something for everybody – we’ll see if the 2019 list can come close to 2018’s in terms of quality and quantity!

Happiest things while traveling: Despite seeming to have a reputation as a bit of a recluse (I think living in Maine and burning wood for heat gives that sort of impression automatically) I really do love going to translator conferences and book fairs. This year’s trips – to Moscow for a translator conference (previous posts 1 and 2) , Frankfurt for the book fair (previous post), and Boston for a Slavist convention (post coming soon!) – were especially enjoyable not just for my papers and presentations but for having the chance to see colleagues. Though I should really say that a good deal of this “seeing” colleagues is really the chance to “eat with” colleagues. Thanks to them, “the most important meal of the day” takes on new meaning, eating wurst and French fries in Frankfurt becomes something positively lovely especially under a warm (!) October sun, and late dinners are a perfect way to finally sit longer and, yes, eat slower (food) after rushing around all day. It’s the people I see at these events – translators, writers, publishers, literary agents, event organizers, and even a few people from my distant academic past – who make travel so enjoyable despite jetlag and packed schedules. I’m a very, very fortunate person.

Best acquisitions: My newish Kobo Aura One electronic reader makes it almost pleasant to read electronically even if the device doesn’t particularly like PDFs. And A History of Russian Literature by Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler is a great (and gigundo) addition to my library that the good people of Oxford University Press were only too happy for me to take off their hands toward the end of the Slavist conference. It’s already come in handy quite a few times and even the index is fun to page through! Special thanks to the nice Marriott employee who helped me cram it into my luggage for the ride home.

Final goodbyes: Sadly, 2018 brought the deaths of Vladimir Voinovich (previous post), Vladimir Sharov (previous post), and Oleg Pavlov (previous post), all of whom I’ve written about, as well as Andrei Bitov, whom I’ve read so little that I’m not even sure what to say other than something absurdly banal about recognizing his importance. (And that I need to buy a better, newer edition of his Pushkin House – the late Soviet-era edition I have is fuzzily printed on awful paper, making it painfully difficult to read.) The loss of Sharov still gives me no peace.

What’s coming up on the blog: Despite my complaints about 2018’s Big Book finalists (previous post) and the high ratio of “abandons” in my reading for much of the year, things are looking up: I loaded up on books in Moscow and Frankfurt, and have been a much happier reader since my required reading period ended. I’ll also be reading mostly books written by women until mid-March, when I’ll be participating in a panel at the London Book Fair about women in literature and translation. I have quite a shelf of recent Russian books, thanks to my own purchases plus gifts from authors, publishers, and the Russian stand in Frankfurt. My stack of English-language books written by women, many of which are translations from various languages into English, is even larger. Best of all is that I haven’t abandoned a book in weeks: I’m on a roll with Alisa Ganieva, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Yulia Yakovleva, and Olga Stolpovskaya. On the English side, I’ve been reading Lara Vapnyar and just started Anna Burns’s Milkman today (a gift from one of those wonderful meal-time colleagues I mentioned above). I’m reading Milkman on the treadmill, which fits the heroine’s habit of reading while walking, not to mention Burns’s skazzy writing, with its momentum and flow, as well as plenty of sly humor and word play.

On that cheery note: Happy New Year! And happy reading!

Disclaimers: The usual. As noted above, I received copies of some of the books mentioned in this post from publishers, literary agents, and other sources. Thank you to all! And thank you to everyone who helped with my travel in various ways. Also: I’m translating Sergei Kuznetsov’s Kaleidoscope.

Image credit: Fireworks in Bratislava, New Year 2005, from Ondrejk, via Wikipedia.

Goodbye to Oleg Pavlov

I’d been planning to write a light, easy post today but I’m writing instead about the death of writer Oleg Pavlov. He died this Moscow afternoon, of a heart attack. He was only 48 and his death saddens me tremendously. 

Pavlov won the 2012 Solzhenitsyn Prize (previous post) and received the 2002 Russian Booker for his Карагандинские девятины, или Повесть последних дней (Requiem for a Soldier, in Anna Gunin’s translation for And Other Stories). Requiem for a Soldier is the final book of a trilogy that And Other Stories has published in full: the other two books are Казенная сказка (Captain of the Steppe in Ian Appleby’s translation) and Дело Матюшина (The Matiushin Case in Andrew Bromfield’s translation). Arch Tate translated Pavlov’s Асистолия (Asystole or Flatline) for Glagoslav; here’s a sample.

I’ve read only Captain of the Steppe (previous post, where I called it A Barracks Tale) and Flatline (previous post). Neither is cheery but both inspired tremendous respect for Pavlov’s writing. He was a very good writer. I’ve been intending to read the second two books of the trilogy for all too many years now.

Pavlov’s death brought back memories of meeting him at the London Book Fair in 2011, particularly debating the ultimate fate of Flatline’s main character with him and two other readers. I didn’t know him well at all, but Phoebe Taplin’s article for The Calvert Journal covers a great deal about Pavlov’s life and reminds me of my exchanges with Pavlov, too, in which he also described catching a cold in London and, among other things, told me I worked too hard and recommended books to read. I’m very sorry to learn of his passing.

Two other articles on Pavlov’s life and writing:

-Colta.ru

-godliteratury.ru

Oodles of Award News: Yasnaya Polyana, Read Russia Translations, Book of the Year

Last week the Yasnaya Polyana Award named finalists for 2012 prizes. The finalists are:

For the “XXI Century” award, which RIA-Novosti called the “adult” award:

• Iurii Buida’s Синяя Кровь (Blue Blood), which I read and enjoyed very much; it was third-prize winner among 2011’s Big Book “regular” reader voters.
• Evgenii Kasimov’s Назовите меня Христофором (Call Me Christopher), which I’d never heard of. (This is what I like so much about award lists…)
• Oleg Pavlov’s Дневник больничного охранника (Diary of a Hospital Guard), which has been on my reader since Pavlov sent me the text ages ago… it looks promising.
• Iurii Petkevich’s С птицей на голове (With a Bird on the Head), another new (and intriguing) title for me.
• Marina Stepnova’s Женщины Лазаря (Lazarus’s Women) a 2012 Big Book finalist I’m reading now.
• Andrei Stoliarov’s Мы, народ (We, the People), another book I’d never heard of.

For the “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” award, a new category this year, the finalists are:

• Marina Aromshtam’s Когда отдыхают ангелы (When (the?) Angels Rest), which I’d heard of through a friend who knows Aromshtam.
• Andrei Dmitriev’s Крестьянин и тинейджер (The Peasant and the Teenager), a 2012 Big Book finalist that I just brought back from Moscow.
• Andrei Zhvalevskii and Evgenii Pasternak’s Время всегда хорошее (The Time Is Always Good), another mysterious title for me.

The Yasnaya Polyana jury will also choose a “contemporary classic” writer who will receive a prize of 900,000 rubles. The XXI Century and Childhood, Adolescence, Youth prizes carry monetary awards of, respectively, 750,000 and 300,000 rubles.

I was in Moscow earlier this month for a literary translator congress that concluded with a ceremony at which four translators were honored with Read Russia translation awards. The winners are:

• Víctor Gallego Ballesteros for his Spanish translation of Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (19th century classical literature)
• John Elsworth for his English translation of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (20th century works written before 1990). Elsworth also won the Rossica prize for Petersburg in May 2012.
• Hélène Henri-Safier for her French translation of Dmitrii Bykov’s Pasternak (contemporary works written after 1990)
• Alessandro Niero for his Italian translation of Dmitrii Prigov’s Thirty Three Texts  (poetry)

Russia Beyond the Headlines has more here. Event photos (including one with a tired-looking me!) available here. There’s even video here, where you can hear the fanfare.

In other award news, Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov)’s «Несвятые святые» и другие рассказы (“Unsaintly Saints” and Other Stories) was named prose of the year at the annual Book of the Year ceremony; this book is also on the 2012 Big Book short list. Boris Ryzhii won the poetry of the year award for his В кварталах дальних и печальных…: Избранная лирика. Роттердамский дневник, which I’ll just call a collection of lyrical poetry that must be related to Rotterdam. A special award went to Daniil Granin for his contributions to literature; Granin’s Мой лейтенант (My Lieutenant) is a 2012 Big Book finalist. I brought this one back from Moscow as well: a fellow book shopper was eager to read it after a friend’s recommendation.

Up Next: Moscow trip report covering the translator conference, the Moscow International Book Fair, and other odds and ends. Then, finally, books! Ergali Ger’s Koma, the Stepnova book, Andrei Rubanov’s short stories, and who knows what else.

Disclaimers: I wrote this with my customary post-travel cold so fear for my ability to successfully fact check my own writing. And then the usual. I write for Read Russia. Also, I met last week with Vladislav Otroshenko, a Yasnaya Polyana Award jury member; I translated Otroshenko’s story “Языки Нимродовой башни” (“The Languages of Nimrod’s Tower”) and can’t wait to read an excerpt of it at the American Literary Translators Association conference in few weeks. I’ll write more about my meeting with Otroshenko in my trip report. 

Misc. Awards News for Early March + A Penguin

There’s more award news this week: for one thing, Oleg Pavlov won the Solzhenitsyn Prize, an annual prize that carries an award of $25,000. I’ll take the easy way out and quote the message I received from Pavlov’s literary agency, Elkost, which says the prize recognizes “works in which troubles of the Russian life are shown with rare moral purity and sense of tragedy, for consecutiveness and steadiness in search of truth.” That’s not too far from the jury’s quote that’s included in a news item on lenta.ru. Previous Solzhenitsyn Prize winners include Valentin Rasputin, Aleksei Varlamov, and Viktor Astaf’ev. I’ve written about two of Pavlov’s novels: Казенная сказка (A Barracks Tale) and Асистолия (Asystole or Flatline).

Meanwhile, the Russian Prize (Русская премия) announced their longlist last week. The long fiction longlist includes Yuz Aleshkovskii’s Маленький тюремный роман (A Little Prison Novel), which I bought a few weeks ago, and Elena Katishonovk’s Когда уходит человек (When a Person Leaves). Maria Rybakova’s Gnedich (a novel in verse) and Sasha Sokolov’s Триптих (Triptych) are among the short fiction entries. The full longlists for poetry, short prose, and long prose are all on the Russian Prize Website. The Russian Prize is awarded to writers who live outside Russia and write in Russian.

Misha is a king penguin.

Finally, (in more ways than one!) I read Andrei Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin, in George Bird’s translation… I’d included the novel on my list of books for a program at my town library last week and realized too late that I could get the original through interlibrary loan. The book seems to have more than one Russian title; the most common being Пикник на льду, literally Picnic on the Ice. Picnics on the ice are a pastime of Viktor, a writer in Kiev who composes obituaries of people still among the living: Viktor and his pet penguin, Misha, go with a mutual friend to the Dnepr, where Misha swims under the ice while the humans enjoy snacks.

I was glad not to know much about the book before reading so will just say that Kurkov’s plot includes Viktor finding himself caring for a small girl and needing to keep a low profile because of post-Soviet dangers linked to those obituaries. Of course Viktor also frequently buys frozen fish. I thought the book was enjoyable, fairly light reading with an apt blend of absurdity and social commentary. And who can resist a sad, affectionate penguin, a precocious little girl, and their lonely caregiver? I almost want to say that Melancholic Absurdity is the novel’s main character.

Blogger Marie Cloutier, also known as Boston Bibliophile, recently heard Kurkov speak at a bookstore event and said he discussed similarities between penguins and Soviets. To quote Marie, “both, he said, are used to rigid civil structures and don’t know how to operate outside of their group.” I thought Aleksei Balakin’s review of Picnic on the Ice, in a 2006 issue of the journal Критическая масса (Critical Mass) offered a nice analysis of the paradox of Kurkov’s work, which is popular in Europe but relatively unknown in Russia.

Melville House, which published Death and the Penguin in the U.S. last year, has released two other Kurkov books in Bird’s translations: Penguin Lost (2011) and The Case of the General’s Thumb (2012). Additional Kurkov books are available in English translation from U.K. publishers.

Up Next: That darn list of recent and upcoming translations. And Roman Senchin’s Информация (The Information). We’ll see which I finish first.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Image Credit: King penguin photo by Samuel Blanc, via Wikipedia.

The Best of Intentions: Oleg Pavlov’s Barracks Tale

Oleg Pavlov’s writing seems to drive me to contradictory reactions: even when I don’t enjoy his books, I can’t put them down. And then, upon reflection, I find myself respecting, liking, and recommending them. Pavlov’s Асистолия (Asystole or Flatline), which I called “a real downer” when I read it last year, still feels like a downer because it delves into the psychology of a nameless guy in post-Soviet Russia who lacks heart function… but it still won’t let me go, a quality I value more than enjoyment during reading.

Pavlov’s Казенная сказка, which I’ll call A Barracks Tale for now, is a downer, too, though in a very different way: Pavlov offers up a sad military parable with a big share of absurdity. I came away from this first novel amazed at Pavlov’s ability to weave together the tragic and the absurd using wickedly expressive language that is almost home(l)y without being cloying or fussy.

With plenty of plot and a setting in the Kazakh steppe, A Barracks Tale may be more topographically open than the extreme interiority of Asystole but Pavlov’s depiction of relationships and close quarters at a military company co-located with a prison, gave me a powerful feeling of claustrophobia. The crux of the story: a captain, Khabarov, plants potatoes to keep his men from going hungry then gets in trouble; the potatoes are confiscated. That’s only the half of it, but Khabarov’s actions and fate (a bad one that I won’t reveal since this book is destined for translation) remind me of one of the most famous utterances credited to Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, “Хотели как лучше, получилось как всегда,” roughly “We wanted better but things turned out the same as usual.” I won’t summarize the plot more since Pavlov’s Facebook page includes a summary (written by Susan Anne Brown for Dalkey Archive Press) of Tale and two subsequent short novels; the trilogy is known as Повести последних дней (Tales of Recent Days).

The summary also likens Pavlov to Gogol, which is perfectly apt, though Pavlov’s humor seemed more muted to me, perhaps because it’s so intrinsically connected with the tragedy and recentness of horrible degradation in the late Soviet era. Pavlov’s dense writing and vivid imagery is perfect for conveying the deprivations and indignities—including lice, not enough (unappetizing) food, and cold—the men face. I felt immersed in shades of khaki, brown, and gray. Though the imagery and action sometimes seemed a little overwhelming and even over-extended—as with Asystole I sometimes couldn’t quite recall what I’d read but then realized, upon review, that I hadn’t missed anything—the novel wraps up with a welcome clarity I hadn’t expected.

As for that title. The second word, сказка/skazka, is the easy one: it’s the word for a fairytale or folk tale. But казённая/kazyonnaya, is difficult because it’s derived from the word казна/kazna, for treasury. Казённый is often used to refer to government property but has taken on more metaphorical meanings that reflect how people see government property and matters: bureaucratic, bland, mediocre. It’s a perfect choice for the title of the book because it expresses so much, from government involvement in a horrible episode to the ubiquitous nature of the problems it depicts.

Toward the end of the book, Pavlov refers to Khabarov as “our captain,” reinforcing his own role as storyteller—this is a skazka, after all—as well as Khabarov’s representation of his men and, by extension, humanity. That “our”—and others before it—also reinforces Pavlov’s power to draw the reader into his story.

Disclosures: Oleg Pavlov very kindly gave me a copy of Казённая сказка at the London Book Fair, where we talked about his work, particularly Asystole. I’ve also met other people involved in bringing A Barracks Tale into English, including Stefan Tobler of publisher And Other Stories.

Up next: Iurii Buida’s Дон Домино, Don Domino, known in Oliver Ready’s English translation as The Zero Train, which I enjoyed very much. And then Viktor Astaf’ev’s Печальный детектив (The Sad Detective), which I’ve just started. Favorites from the letter K and a nonfiction roundup are on the way this summer, too.

Image credit: Ayla87, via sxc.hu

The Russian Booker Lives

The Russian Booker Prize has a new general sponsor, Российская корпорация средств связи, known as Russian Telecom Equipment Company in English. RTEC has a history of supporting literary awards: it began sponsoring the Student Booker in 2010 and has been involved with that program for seven years, according to a news story on Lenta.ru. Lenta also reports that a five-year sponsorship contract with the Booker may be signed this summer.

No Booker will be awarded for 2011; books released this year may be submitted for the 2012 prize season. The Booker will, however, hold a special “Booker of the Decade” competition in 2011. All shortlisted books from 2001-2010 are eligible. Judges from past Booker seasons will choose five works each to develop a shortlist that will be announced in early November. The winner will be announced on December 1; the prize will be 600,000 rubles.

The Booker site has a summary of rules plus a list of all eligible Booker of the Decade books online here. There are lots of books on the list that I’d love to see get more (or less!) attention… and I’d be interested in hearing reader predictions.

For my part, I’m about to start reading Oleg Pavlov’s Казенная сказака (A Barracks Tale or Military Apologue), a 1995 Booker finalist and the first book of a trilogy that culminated in Карагандинские девятины, или Повесть последних дней (A Ninth-Day Wake/Party at Karaganda or A Story of Recent Days or Commemoration in Karaganda), which won the Booker in 2002. (Oy, there are multiple translated titles floating around for these books!) Readers on the lookout for English-language translations will be happy to know that A Barracks Tale is listed as winning a translation grant from Transcript, a program of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation; publisher is And Other Stories.

Old News Is Good News

As has become my not-so-good habit, I’ve been hoarding news…

1. Marina Palei won the Russian Prize (Русская премия) recently for her novel Хор (The Chorus/Choir), which is also on this year’s Big Book long list. Many of Palei’s other texts are available on her Web site. Iurii Serebrianskii won the short prose prize for “Destination. Дорожная пастораль” (“Destination. A Road Pastorale”), and Natal’ia Gorbanevskaia won the poetry award. The Russian Prize is awarded to writers outside Russia who write in Russian; background is available here. [Update: For more, in Russian, on the Russian Prize, here's an OpenSpace.ru interview with the prize's coordinator.]

2. A Московские Новости interview with writer Oleg Pavlov mentions that Pavlov’s trilogy Повести последних дней (Tales of Recent Days) will be published in English translation by And Other Stories. The first two books of the trilogy, in an edition that Oleg kindly brought to London for me, are waiting on the Bookshelf. Pavlov’s interview answers are quite candid as he discusses presentations at the book fair, reactions to the Russian booth, and politic aspects of who goes abroad to fairs.

Pavlov also says only three social novels came out of the noughties: his own Asystole/Flatline, Zakhar Prilepin’s Sank’ya, and Roman Senchin’s The Yeltyshevs. I’m sure I’d think of another title or two to offer for consideration if I went through my blog archives but – given my admiration for (and work on) Senchin’s book, my appreciation for the difficult but very affecting Asystole, and Sank’ya’s up-close look at political opposition and violence – I would certainly agree that these three novels are some of the decade’s most important social prose. They form a bleak triptych of various types of post-Soviet social breakdowns and disconnects.

3. Meanwhile, the book fair circuit continues: Russia is the guest country at the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino, which opens on giovedi, 12 maggio. And what better way to practice your Italian than reading the program? Some of the same writers who were in London – e.g. Liudmila Ulitskaya, Mikhail Elizarov, Zakhar Prilepin – will be there, as will Sasha Sokolov, Viktor Erofeev, and Julia Latinina. And film director Aleksandr Sokurov.

4. Finally, for those of you who will be in the New York area in late May: Causa Artium will host Olga Slavnikova in events on May 20, 22, and 25 in, respectively, Jersey City, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. Marian Schwartz, who translated 2017, will participate in the event on May 25, in Manhattan. I’ll be there, too! Each Slavnikova event will be followed by a “New Faces, New Voices: Rising Stars of Russian Writing” program featuring four winners of the Debut Prize. I enjoyed hearing two of these writers speak in London so will make sure to have an extra afternoon coffee so I can stay for the second half of the evening. And stay awake after a day at Book Expo America. All the events are free. RSVP on Causa Artium’s Facebook listings, if you’d like.

Up Next: Aleksandr Snegirev’s Тщеславие (Vanity), then Mikhail Shishkin’s Венерин волос (Maidenhair).

Disclosures: Standard disclosures apply.

Yasnaya Polyana Award Short List

Six finalists for Yasnaya Polyana’s “21^st Century” award were announced on September 9, Lev Tolstoy’s birthday. The books sound like a varied bunch:

Aleksandr Ilichevskii’s Перс (The Persian), a novel about an émigré to the U.S. who returns to his place of birth, on the Caspian, where he sees a childhood friend who lives in a nature preserve. (I’ll be reading this one soon.)

Boris Klimychev’s Треугольное письмо (most likely The Triangular Letter), a novel in stories that’s available online: начало окончание

Maksim Osipov’s Грех жаловаться (literally, It’s a Sin to Complain… more Maine-ish, Can’t Complain), writings by a rural doctor. In 2007 Osipov received an award from the journal Знамя, which has published his work. Online here. A review here.

Oleg Pavlov’s complex novel Асистолия (Asystole), which I wrote about here.

Mikhail Tarkovskii’s Замороженное время (Frozen Time), stories about people living on the Yenisei River. (In case you’re wondering about his name… Yes, Tarkovskii is the grandson of poet Arsenii Tarkovskii, whose poetry I have enjoyed, and a nephew of director Andrei Tarkovskii. His father is film director Aleksandr Gordon.)

Elena Takho-Godi’s У мирного порога моего (How about: At My Quiet Doorstep), another collection of short stories, available online here.

The Yasnaya Polyana awards recognize works with humanistic and moral ideals. The award was co-founded in 2003 by the Yasnaya Polyana Museum and Samsung Electronics. The prize got much richer this year, according to Lenta.ru: the 21st Century winner will receive 750,000 rubles, and the winner of the Contemporary Classic award will receive 900,000 rubles. Winners will be announced in October.

Up next: I had a very slow reading week thanks to home repairs and lots of allergies (largely caused by afore-mentioned home repairs) so haven’t quite finished The Devil’s Wheel. I suspect I also started slowing the pace, subconsciously, at around page 650 because I’ve enjoyed the book so much that I don’t want to finish it... I’ll be back soon with more.

Photo credit: SiefkinDR, via Wikipedia.

No Heart Function: Pavlov’s Asystole

Oleg Pavlov’s Асистолия (sorry, Blogger won’t let me simply italicize Cyrillic today...) (Asystole, colloquially “flatline”) is a tough book: 370 pages of third-person narrative streams about a nameless boy-then-man in a state of torpor. I think Asystole succeeds, perhaps even brilliantly, on its own terms, but it was very, very difficult to read…

Structure. Asystole’s narrative is a kind I don’t like much: sometimes jumpy and nervous with unexpected transitions between times, places, and characters, sometimes resting for many pages on seemingly unimportant episodes. Words flowed and flowed, and the reading sometimes felt robotic. I often wondered what I was missing but when I tracked back I found the answer was Not much. I shouldn’t have doubted. The book obviously affected me: the more I read, the more nameless guy’s miserable life sucked me in even as it repelled me.

The Characters. Some Russian reviews note that Pavlov’s nameless antihero is a modern-day superfluous man; I might kick in a bit of Dostoevsky’s spiteful, diseased underground man, too. Pavlov’s antihero is apparently a talented artist but, in therapy-influenced English, he doesn’t connect with other people. Or his own life, which inspires dread and fear. He says “не получается жить,” roughly that he has trouble living. He muddles along, and nobody else in the book is very appealing, either. His father died when he was small, and nameless guy and his mother don’t get along very well. He and his girlfriend-then-wife meet when he is quite drunk; she escorts him home. She has her own drinking problems and screams things like “Ненавижу!” (“I hate [you]!”) more than once. His uncle, a professor, is full of himself. But at least the other characters rate names.

The Diagnosis. Several characters, from nameless guy to the cat, have various heart problems; “asystole” is a physical and metaphorical diagnosis. Our antihero feels unneeded and empty, enjoyment is short-lived, and friends are few. I think the diagnosis extends to much of society, too, particularly opportunists at a funeral home and hospital, unfeeling bureaucrats at the civil registry office, and so on. An art teacher is one of the few relatively bright spots; nameless guy even invites him over for dinner once. The teacher tells him his mother is lonely. *sigh*

Unenjoyable Reading. It would be too strong to say I hated reading Asystole, but I didn’t enjoy it a bit. I did, however, admire – very much – Pavlov’s ability to drag me into the morass of nameless guy’s life, where all the main characters are so absolutely miserable. I found it far sadder than most of the other чернуха (chernukha, dreary naturalism) I’ve read because Pavlov forced me so deeply into his characters’ problems. Pavlov brings out the multifaceted inertness of their relationships with differing techniques: sometimes there’s no dialogue, sometimes there’s strange dialogue or monologue, and sometimes it seems that characters in the same place don’t interact.

At Least I’m Not Alone. I haven’t read a lot of Russian criticism of Asystole but the first few reviews I looked at showed that my reactions to and difficulties with Asystole were pretty typical. Blogger Заметил просто says he wished he could have punched a(ny) character. Lev Danilkin wrote only a mini review and hedges, not sure whether to call Asystole hallucination, dream, or sad fantasy. Liza Novikova sees lots of meaningless conversation and says nameless guy’s real difference from the rest of us is that he has trouble communicating with other people. I agree with all of them.

In the End… Asystole was a hard emotional hit, even though I’m not quite sure what I read: the book is amorphous yet fairly linear, dull yet mesmerizing. It was a book to feel rather than reason with, though its effect is also impersonal: nameless guy is so specific in his misery and lack of hope that it’s easy to think his diagnosis doesn’t apply to me or you. Even though it could or does… Which is the reason the one thing I know for sure about Asystole is that it is, for lack of other terms, depressing, a real downer. Still, I fully agree with Liza Novikova that you can feel the “биение его [романа] пульса,” the novel’s pulse beating.

Level for non-native readers of Russian: 3.5 or 4.0/5.0. Vocabulary isn’t especially difficult but the narrative flow, transitions, and lack of breaks – Asystole is composed of seven lengthy “pictures” plus a very, very brief epilogue – make the book dense and difficult to follow.

For more:

• The book’s ISBN: 978-5-9691-0553-9
• Read Асистолия online in the journal Знамя here: начало окончание
• Read Асистолия online in simulated book form, on Комсомольская правда here

Up next: Чертово колесо (The Devil's Wheel) from Mikhail Gigolashvili, about opiate addiction in Georgia. I’m just getting started but Gigolashvili’s straight-ahead narrative and brutal realism make this a big change from my last two books. We’re off to the beach…

Asystole image from Glenlarson, via Wikipedia.