August Is Women in Translation Month: Translations of Russian Women

Looking back at my Women in Translation Month post from 2014 was an interesting exercise. For one thing, the blogger known as Biblibio, who started Women in Translation Month back in 2014, now uses her real name, Meytal Radzinski. And she continues to read and write about tons of books (do visit her blog!) and has generated tremendous awareness of and reactions to gender-based disparities in translated literature. According to the Women in Translation site (there’s a site now!), only about 30% of new translations into English are of books written by women. This year’s list of Russian-to-English translations (here) is in that range.

That’s a downer of a datum, but I’m happy there are books—meaning books translated into English—already available or on the way from some of the authors I mentioned in my old post. I’m working on Margarita Khemlin’s Klotsvog (previous post) for the Russian Library/Columbia University Press and my translation of Marina Stepnova’s Безбожный переулок (Italian Lessons) (previous post) is in process, too, for World Editions. Meanwhile, Carol Apollonio’s translation of Alisa Ganieva’s Bride and Groom (previous post) is coming this year, from Deep Vellum, and Melanie Moore’s translation of Khemlin’s The Investigator (previous post) is already available from Glagoslav. I’m also at various stages with two other books, both for Oneworld, written by women that I didn’t mention in that post because I hadn’t yet read them: Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (previous post) will soon be edited and I’ll be starting on Narine Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell from the Sky (previous post) later this year.

Since I’m one to accentuate the positive—while simultaneously trying to find ways to counter the negative—I want to highlight three of the books on this year’s translation list that are written by women and that (bias warning!) particularly interest me:

• Ksenia Buksha’s The Freedom Factory, translated by Anne Fisher (Phoneme Media). I’m embarrassingly long overdue to read this National Bestseller Award winner, which I’ve heard so many good things about over the years.
• Polina Dashkova’s Madness Treads Lightly, translated by Marian Schwartz (Amazon Crossing). I read lots of Dashkova’s detective novels, including this one, in the early 2000s, when I got myself back into Russian reading: her writing and characters are clear, and she always seems to address social and political issues, too. Quality genre fiction like Dashkova’s deserves to be translated. Publishers Weekly gave Madness, in Marian’s translation, a starred review.
• Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s City Folk and Country Folk, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov (Russian Library/Columbia University Press). It’s great to see a translation of a nineteenth-century novel written by a woman… and this one sounds like particular fun. I’m looking forward to it! This translation also received a star from Publishers Weekly.

This year’s disappointingly all-male Big Book shortlist (the list) made me vow to seek out female authors’ books that made 2017’s Big Book longlist or National Bestseller shortlist. (I’m sure there are plenty of books that will keep me reading far longer than, say, Pelevin’s Big Book finalist Methuselah’s Lamp, or The Last Battle of the Chekists and Masons.) I mentioned a few candidates in my Big Book shortlist post: Anna Starobinets’s Посмотри на него (Look at Him, maybe?), Anna Kozlova’s NatsBest-winning F20, and Elena Dolgopyat’s short stories. Other candidates, whose authors are completely new to me, include Olga Breininger’s There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and Viktoria Lebedeva’s Без труб и барабанов (Without Trumpets and Drums). I’ll be interested to see what hits other award lists later this year—more lists, from the Yasnaya Polyana, Booker, and NOS awards are on the way—and what other books might find their way into English in the coming years.

More literature by women will make its way into translation one poem at a time, one story at a time, one book at a time… so I’m just going to keep on reading. And translating. And recommending good books to publishers. Translator recommendations, after all, are how some of the translations mentioned in this post got signed in the first place. And I know there are more on the way.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up Next: Vladimir Medvedev’s Заххок (Zahhok), which has taken over my reading: this polyphonic novel set in Tadzhikistan is ridiculously suspenseful and absorbing. And more Big Book reading: Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Mysterious Year and Shamil Idiatullin’s Brezhnev City.

Smart Women, Dumb Choices: Latynina’s Distressed Damsels

Genre fiction has fascinated me since I read my first socialist realism novel, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, in college. The rules of sotsrealism were painfully clear… and harshly enforced. I also loved sentimentalism, particularly Nikolai Karamzin’s story “Бедная Лиза” (“Poor Liza”) and all the “teary” imitators that followed in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries.

I enjoy Russian detective novels, too, and think part of the attraction is the illusion that the books mirror real life in contemporary Russia. Two short novels by Julia Latynina, who’s also a radio journalist at Эхо Москвы (Echo of Moscow), showed me, once again, how crooked, as they say in Russian, the genre-based mirror is. I chose Latynina’s Только голуби летают бесплатно (Only Pigeons [or Doves] Fly for Free) for its title. The volume includes another short novel, Ничья, which could be translated as Nobody’s Woman or The Tie, as in a tie game. Both translations fit.

Latynina’s two short novels occupy the “new Russian lifestyles” corner of the detective subgenre I think of as “damsels in distress.” Latynina’s women, whom we watch make their ways through crime-related situations, barely resemble the modest single mothers with problems in Polina Dashkova’s novels, nor are they like the rich, friendly McDonald’s customer who’s the heroine of many of Dar’ia Dontsova’s ironic detective books. But they’re still familiar.

My genre fascination is related to that familiarity: avid genre readers know the typical plot turns and character types they’re likely to encounter. I love watching for new twists that update the familiar and respond to post-Soviet social changes. Latynina’s books both focus on fundamentally honest and intelligent women – one is an architect, the other is a student at the London School of Economics – surrounded by wealth. Both books outline webs of white-collar and violent crime, showing how the women get caught up.

Latynina’s writing is concise, simple, and not especially evocative, and there is too much bare description of crooked business deals for my taste. Plus many piranhas. Latynina doesn’t spend words developing round characters, but it’s obvious her women are tragically attached to their men – they contrast sharply with the more independent, practical women I’ve met in Dashkova and Dontsova’s books. Anya of Pigeons is so jealous of the attention her Moscow-based father pays to his mistresses that she tries to resemble them. (Paging Dr. Freud…) When Daddy is killed, Anya vows to find the killer in Moscow. What happens when all is revealed at the end of the book and Anya’s about to fly back to London without getting involved with her late father’s icky business partner? They end up kissing on the tarmac in the snow!!

We’re all pop psychologists these days, so let me just say I noticed some serious self-esteem issues with Elena in Nobody’s Woman, too. Like Anya, she thinks she’s not very pretty, and after a businessman dumps her, she ends up with his more violent rival. Both men also spend time with model-like women they demean for being unintelligent but (of course!) respect and desire Elena because she’s smarter and (of course!) beautiful. Let’s just say these guys spell big trouble for Elena.

I don’t mean to imply that these characters or their problems and actions are unique to Russia – at their genre-soaked cores, they’re as universal as the Cinderella story. That’s probably why they dominated my impressions of Latynina’s novels. Interestingly, when I searched for opinions of the book, I found this Russian review that says the two novels (and a third) will live short lives. Like me, the author, who goes by the pseudonym “Your Book Pilot,” also focuses on genre, noting an Aesopian aspect to Latynina’s fiction and comparing Latynina to Julian Semenov, a Soviet-era writer best remembered for the TV adaptation of his novel Семнадцать мгновений весны (Seventeen Moments of Spring). The Pilot writes that Latynina fell into the same trap as Semenov, who wrote analytical novels exposing political crimes.

Which brings me back to where I started: genre rules and reader expectations. Latynina’s book didn’t keep me reading until midnight, and I suspect Book Pilot also had no trouble putting it down. Even so, there’s always something fun about poking around in a book’s genre norms, particularly when that involves reading a fictionalized version of contemporary Russia to look at the intersections of new mores with familiar old plots and character traits. I’m sure I’ll read more.

An excerpt of Latynina’s Ниязбек (Niyazbek) is available in Andrew Bromfield’s translation on the Glas site here.

For more on the Russian detective genre, I recommend Anthony Olcott’s Russian Pulp. I also think Vladimir Propp’s study of the limited narrative twists in fairy tales is a lot of fun. Wikipedia lists 31 “functions” here. Many of them – particularly Number 2, interdiction – certainly apply to the Latynina novels.

Photo: hbrinkman via sxc.hu

Latynina on Amazon

Russian Pulp on Amazon

Catching Up: Two Novellas, One Novel

Leonid Leonov’s Конец мелкого человека (The End of a Petty Man) has a heck of a first line:

Поздним вечером одной зимы, когда, после долгих и бесплодных поисков какой-нибудь пищи, тащился он домой бесцельно, встречен был им неожиданный человек с лошадиной головой под мышкой.

Late in the evening one winter, when he was dragging himself home aimlessly after long and fruitless searches for some kind of food, he ran across an unexpected person with a horse head under his arm.

Of course it’s the horse head that got me. As an optimist, I thought the unexpected person was leading a horse in a strange way, but The End is a novella about the early 1920s in the USSR, when food and firewood were scarce. Horse heads end up on the table – food for transitional epochs, one character says – and kind guests bring firewood when they visit. Fedor Andreich, the story’s main character, by the way, scares the horse head right out from under the other man’s arm then takes it.

Fedor Andreich is a professor writing about the Mesozoic Era… leading to all sorts of mentions of caves, ice, and even dinosaurs. Of course Fedor Andreich is something of a soon-to-be-extinct dinosaur himself, a superfluous man for his time who’s so unpleasant he even forgets his dying sister.

The End of a Petty Man is a strange, almost hallucinatory story that also includes an alter ego of sorts, a “ферт” (fert) that visits Fedor Andreich. “Fert” can mean either the name of the Russian letter Ф (f) or a fop. Or both, I think: Fedor begins with F, after all, and he is rather vain. The story conjures up images and themes from an almost endless stream of predecessors, including 19^th-century fiction with doubles, devils, and mental health, as well as more contemporaneous stories, notably Evgenii Zamiatin’s “Пещера” (“The Cave”). There are also Biblical references, including that apocalyptic horse’s head, the Ten Commandments, and a doctor’s office referred to as something of a “sodom,” a chaotic place.

I don’t know if The End of a Petty Man has been translated but I do know it is easier to find Leonov’s work in English translation than in Russian originals. Leonov’s short story “Бродяга” (“The Tramp”) is available online, in English translation, on Sovlit, and there are translated novels for sale on Amazon. If I had to describe in one word what little I’ve read of Leonov’s early work, I’d probably chose “intriguing” or maybe “edgy,” thanks to the feeling I was reading a strange cross between, maybe, Dostoevsky and Platonov or Pilniak. The End was alternately suspenseful and enjoyable, with occasional tedious moments.

“Tedious” describes Филиал (The Foreign Branch), Sergei Dovlatov’s novella about a radio station reporter attending a conference in Los Angeles about the future of Russia. Though some of the flashbacks to the narrator’s (“Dalmatov’s”) early and obsessive love for the treacherous Taisiia feel fairly true, there are too many of them to achieve a good balance with the present-day observations, which lack the acidity of, say, The Compromise. (Previous post: The Compromise) The title’s foreign branch, by the way, refers to the United States, which is seen as a foreign branch for the future Russia. I think Dovlatov writes best – meaning with the sharpest absurdity and humor – about the USSR, not the USA, but that’s a personal preference.

It took months of on-and-off reading to get through Источник счастья (The Source of Happiness), Polina Dashkova’s attempt to cram the Russian revolution, a parasite that gives eternal life (!), a superwealthy Russian businessman, and a pile of family history into one book. I’ve read and enjoyed several Dashkova detective novels but Happiness tries too hard to address too many Big Questions. The attempt to address history and eternity lured Dashkova away from what she writes best: crime novels about the post-Soviet period that describe frayed social fabric and the heroism of ordinary women. These are the books that keep me up at night.

In Russian Pulp, a detailed study of Russian detective novels, Anthony Olcott compares Dashkova with her peers and concludes, “Perhaps the most eloquent explorations of the collapse of the Russian state, however, come in the novels of Polina Dashkova.” Some of Dashkova’s books have been translated into German: look for Polina Daschkowa.

Leonid Leonov on Amazon
Sergei Dovlatov on Amazon
Polina Dashkova on Amazon
Russian Pulp on Amazon