A few news items for a chilly Friday:
Ulitskaya on Amazon
Kurkov on Amazon
Figes on Amazon
Friday, March 20, 2009
International Booker, Russian Literature Week, Figes Update
Ulitskaya on Amazon
Kurkov on Amazon
Figes on Amazon
Sunday, March 8, 2009
All the (Old) News from Last Week
Hmm, last week was one of those weeks when there was so much Russian lit-related news that I could have written a post a day. Of course I didn’t. Atonement, in the forum of a summary:
The Russian Prize jury named its long lists of nominees for authors writing in Russian but living outside Russia. Many of the novelist names are unfamiliar, but I read Zinovii Zinik’s Mushroom Picker years ago in translation (it left a favorable impression) and remember Aleks Tarn as a 2007 Booker nominee. I also have a book of stories by Boris Khazanov on my shelf: a friend read and loved them. Here’s the full list of nominees for poetry, short prose, and long prose.
Politics & Books
A story from March 4th reports that Orlando Figes’s book The Whisperers, about life in the Stalin era, will not appear in Russian translation as planned. The Guardian has more, including Figes’s allegation that a Russian publisher, Atticus, cancelled publication for political reasons. Atticus cited business reasons – a focus on potential bestsellers rather than small print runs – for the cancellation. I thought The Whisperers was very good (previous post).
Meanwhile, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration accused writer Viktor Erofeev of extremism and Russophobia for his novel Энциклопедия русской души (Encyclopedia of the Russian Soul). Erofeev has always been controversial: I remember when, in the perestroika era, one Russian friend gave me a copy of Erofeev’s Русская красавица (Russian Beauty), which another friend denounced (without having read it) as trash. I have yet to read the book so don’t know if I think it’s trash or not, but I do wish “they” would just leave Erofeev and Sorokin and other writers in peace to write their books.
Catchall
An item from March 5th reports that three new cultural institutions should open in downtown Moscow before 2010: a museum in honor of Mikhail Bulgakov, a cinema arts library named for Sergei Eisenshtein, and a museum honoring the family of film director Andrei Tarkovskii. Andrei Tarkovskii’s father, Arsenii, was a poet; he is buried in the same Peredelkino cemetery as Boris Pasternak.
Vasilii Aksenov underwent an operation last week for a blood clot. He had a stroke last January.
Believe it or not, Britains often lie about having read books. 1984 and War and Peace top the list of “books we pretend we have read.”
Speaking of War and Peace, which I truly am still reading… I’ll be writing a little less about War and Peace in the immediate future but I plan to start a new series, “Russian Writers: A to Я,” very soon. I’ll start with A, and continue through the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, listing a favorite prose writer and poet for each letter.
Zinovii Zinik on Amazon
Boris Khazanov on Amazon
Orlando Figes on Amazon
Viktor Erofeev on Amazon
Vasilii Aksenov on Amazon
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Orlando Figes’s “Natasha’s Dance”: Mosh Pit or Mazurka?
Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia attempts, as Russians say, to embrace the unembraceable. Is it possible to reduce Russia’s cultural history and identity to 587 pages? Not really, so Figes reins in his material by embracing only selected topics, including the Decembrists, religion, Eastern influences, and Russians in emigration. He covers literature, fine art, and music, bookending the bulk of his narrative with Peter the Great’s selection of a site for St. Petersburg in 1703 and Igor Stravinskii’s 1962 trip to the USSR.
Natasha’s Dance enjoys enormous popularity, largely because it presupposes no familiarity with Russian history. Figes broadens its appeal by choosing some favorite figures for extended coverage. Some, such as serf singer Praskovia Sheremeteva and exiled Decembrist Sergei Volkonskii, don’t receive much attention among nonspecialists. Other profiles cover more familiar ground: writers Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Nabokov, and composer Dmitrii Shostakovich.
Trying to cover so many people and art forms in so few pages can create writing dilemmas, and Natasha’s Dance ends up a chaotic piece of prose, a mosh pit of Russian culture. The book and I aren’t a close match, tastewise, particularly since I prefer chronological history and felt whipsawed when Figes shifted from century to century to fit his accounts into thematic silos.
The regrettably brief plot summary of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Soviet-era Master and Margarita, for example, lands not with its contemporaries in the “Russia Through the Soviet Lens” chapter, but toward the end of the “Moscow! Moscow!” chapter because “M&M” is based in Moscow. The next section after “Moscow! Moscow!” is the beginning of a new chapter, “The Peasant Marriage,” which goes back to 1874 to look at народники, or populists.
I also sometimes had the feeling Figes left out crucial material to avoid complicating his theses. The “Descendants of Genghis Khan” chapter, for example, begins with Vasilii Kandinskii’s (Vasily Kandinsky) 1889 anthropological research into paganism in the Komi region. Figes then drops back in time to Mongol horsemen of 1237. He ends the chapter by considering horses in Kandinskii’s paintings as dual shaman and religious symbols and draws in other examples of horses as symbols of Russia’s Asiatic legacy. Fine, but, oddly, Figes doesn’t mention Kandinskii’s depictions of horsemen of the apocalypse, and he ignores much of Kandinskii’s broader significance: his symbolist beliefs about colors and the fluid boundaries between painting and music, expressed in Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
These and other structural and informational peculiarities are frustrating, as are some of Figes’s grand statements, most of which add only superfluous drama. On page 228, for example: “Like an unsolved riddle, the peasant remained unknown and perhaps unknowable.” There are also rhetorical “burning” questions, like these regarding Russian identity, on page 366, “Were they Europeans or Asians? Were they the subjects of the Tsar or descendants of Genghis Khan?”
This portentous style contrasts sharply with the admirably measured tone of Figes’s The Whisperers, and Natasha’s Dance suffers, perhaps unfairly, because I read The Whisperers first. In The Whisperers Figes writes with restraint and respect as he addresses one aspect of Soviet history, the Stalin-era repression. His neutral tone allows voices from oral history to carry the book, showing the human impact of Joseph Stalin’s excesses against the Soviet population. (My review of The Whisperers.)
On the positive side, the breadth of material in Natasha’s Dance means there should be something new or interesting for most general readers or unmethodical specialists. I found some passages, such as the brief history of early Soviet cinema, entertaining, and I appreciated Figes’s examination of Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a novel about how Decembrism grew out of the War of 1812. Although I thought the summaries of many novels became tedious because they lacked context and/or analysis, I hope they will inspire new readers.
One of the most useful aspects of the book is its end matter: notes, a chronology, and a detailed “Guide to Further Reading.” Figes’s bibliography includes two books that I read in college courses and recommend highly: Nicholas Riasanovsky’s A History of Russia and James Billington’s The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. I particularly enjoyed the Billington book, which looks at cultural and intellectual history beginning with Kievan Rus’ and ending with a contemplative section on “The Irony of Russian History.”
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Natasha’s Dance provoked a literary row in Great Britain when Rachel Polonsky published what was evidently a scathing review in the Times Literary Supplement in 2002. I haven’t read it because I couldn’t find it online, but The Complete Review posted an accounting of the matter in 2002. The fuss continued into this week (!) when The Guardian paid damages to Polonsky “after publishing defamatory allegations that her review of a book was motivated by some grudge or professional envy.” (Article.)
Summary: Although I don’t share the enthusiasm of many other readers for Natasha’s Dance, I think it is worth reading as an introduction to selected topics in Russian cultural history. Many figures in Figes’s peripheral vision receive short shrift in a book that, understandably, makes no attempt at balance or comprehensiveness. I can’t blame Figes for wanting to write about what he enjoys – that’s what I do, too – but Natasha’s Dance may disappoint readers looking for chronology or completeness.
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia
Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
The Icon and the Axe : An Interpretive History of Russian Culture
A History of Russia: Combined Volume
Monday, February 4, 2008
Orlando Figes's "The Whisperers"
Orlando Figes’s 700-page The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia is a history book that reads as an encyclopedia of human suffering. Figes’s eloquent account of the Stalin era allows hundreds of pieces of oral history to demonstrate the effects of Joseph Stalin’s excesses. Figes connects these stories with historical background, using facts and simple language rather than hyperbolic commentary.
Figes’s low-key approach results in a well-constructed sociopolitical history of repression in the Soviet Union that exposes the long-lasting consequences of Stalinism. The Whisperers holds tremendous value for readers interested in 20thcentury Russian or Soviet history, literature, and culture.
Figes covers 1917-2006, examining the effects of arrests, trials, forced labor, and prison camps on lives and memory. He moves, chronologically, through Soviet history, looking at families of party activists, dekulakization, collectivization, World War 2, the Khrushchev-era thaw, and perestroika, often threading events from families’ lives through hundreds of pages. Some of his subjects, such as Elena Bonner and Konstantin Simonov, are public figures, but most are unknown.
The Whisperers should appeal to readers with many levels of knowledge about the Stalin era. The book examines that time methodically, making it a good introduction for people unfamiliar with the period. Figes’s depth of information makes the book equally valuable for readers like me who have gathered knowledge from diverse sources but have never made a rigorous study of the time. Most anyone should discover something new in the oral histories from families accused of being kulaks or politically disloyal.
I think readers of Soviet and post-Soviet fiction should find The Whisperers valuable as a companion volume. Beyond providing historical data useful to understanding novels like Anatolii Rybakov’s Дети Арбата (Children of the Arbat) or Vasilii Aksenov’s Московская сага (Moscow Saga, known in English as Generations of Winter) that focus on the Stalin years, Figes’s psychological insights explain behavior that might seem irrational.
Readers of Russian literature may also be interested in the story of Konstantin Simonov, a Soviet writer whom Figes features prominently in The Whisperers. Many aspects of Simonov’s story are quite common:
Simonov was an altogether more complex, perhaps even tragic character [compared with Boris Gorbatov]. He clearly had a conscience: he was troubled and even repulsed by some aspects of the “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign. But he lost himself in the Stalinist system. (pg. 503)
Figes’s Website includes PDFs of interviews and archival documents that he used in writing The Whisperers.
