It’s the Pits: Digging Deep In A. Pelevin’s Kalinova Yama

Yes, Alexander Pelevin remains my favorite Pelevin even if his Калинова Яма (Kalinova Yama) doesn’t offer quite the level of cosmic suspense and heady thrills, chills, and excitement of Четверо (The Four) (previous post), which I so enjoyed a couple months ago. In The Four, Pelevin skillfully, even sneakily (I admire “sneakily” in writers), connects three very distinct plotlines, partly aided by, surprise!, a Vvedensky poem. Kalinova Yama feels heavier, weightier, with its twentieth-century history – Spain, Germany, the USSR, wars – and the novel’s storytelling devices feel slightly labored, too, though I enjoyed the tension of the slower pace. All told, Kalinova Yama v. The Four is a case where the comparison sounds far harsher than the reality, at least for me: I finished and enjoyed Kalinova Yama, unlike a friend who picked it up thinking it was by that other Pelevin; alas, she found the book “нудная” (the Oxford Russian Dictionary offers up “tedious” and “boring” – think “nudnik”!), perhaps because she was expecting something completely different. Kalinova Yama did feel a slight bit long, something Dmitry Bykov mentions here, so pruning could have prevented a little skimming, per Elmore Leonard’s tenth rule, here. But I digress.

So, yes, I finished the book, enjoying it and letting it keep me up at night. Describing Kalinova Yama isn’t easy, though. I jotted in the back of my book “blends World War 2, psychology of the 1930s, folk motifs, spy novel.” All basically true. The main character initially seems to be a Soviet journalist, Oleg Safronov, but he turns out to be German, one Helmut Laube, who’s working undercover and receives instructions to travel to Kalinova Yama in June 1941. He tells his editor he wants to go interview a local writer. (Ha!) The catch – the mystery, really, which I’ll be very vague about so as not to spoil things – is that something happens in Kalinova Yama and Laube’s train ride turns out to be extraordinarily, even epically, problematic.

Pelevin writes his novel in several layers. The layer that interested me most was Laube’s activity in June 1941: the runup to his travel and the travel itself, which gets weirder and weirder. And then even weirder. But I like weird. (In fact I’m prizing weird books more and more these days, perhaps because of the state of the world?) I loved the numerous takes on the train station and Laube’s contact in Kalinova Yama, not to mention the conductor in Laube’s train car; the word “проводник” can also mean a sort of guide, which this conductor ends up being, too. Other pluses: interrogation transcripts that are interspersed throughout the novel and some of the texts attributed to the local writer. I was less interested in Laube’s past in Spain and Poland (some passages felt too long) and his future, from which he tells of his post-war fate; I zipped through some of it fairly quickly.

There were other texts tossed in, too, including an article (real or not, I’m not sure) about the psychology of the яма/yama, a word that means, among other things, “pit” or “dip” or “pothole” or even “prison,” and is used in the book’s title, which is a toponym. This, of course, sets up an interesting set of pits: the personal and psychological, as well as the geographical and physical, plus something bigger and more metaphysical, what I came to think of as a sort of meta-pit. Pelevin’s at his best describing what I’ll call Laube’s series of approaches into Kalinova Yama (there’s far more to it!) and all the confusion (so much confusion! so many dreams! so many nationalities! so many names!) that arises around Laube, then tossing in information on how others see Laube. There are also nice touches like a talking duck, a yucky hotel, and a cigarette case that magically doesn’t empty. All in all, my only regret is that I read The Four, Pelevin’s third book, before reading Kalinova Yama, which is his second book: Kalinova Yama has more than enough to offer as an interesting, twisted, and even enigmatic exploration of identity and reality that kept me reading and wondering, but The Four felt much more accomplished, more sparkling, to me, with nothing at all (per Elmore Leonard) that I ever considered skipping or skimming.

Disclaimers and disclosures. The usual.

Up next. Anna Kozlova’s Rurik, Sukhbat Aflatuni’s Big Book finalist Earthly Paradise, and then something else. Two books written in English: Jennifer Croft’s memoir Homesick and Olga Zilberbourg’s Like Water and Other Stories.

Happy New Year! & 2014 Highlights. The Footnotes Have It!

Happy new year! С Новым годом! I wish everyone an extraordinarily happy, healthy 2015 with an abundance of good, (whatever that may mean to you), fun, enjoyable books. This year, like last, turned out to be all about quality over quantity, with, alas, a plethora of abandoned books… fortunately, the good books more than made up for the books I didn’t finish. Here are some highlights.

Favorite book by an author I’d already read. I still haven’t posted about Evgeny Vodolazkin’s Solovyov and Larionov, which I finished several months ago. But a post is on the way. Seriously. In brief, though, Solovyov is a Petersburg historian who goes to Crimea for a conference about Larionov, a White Army general. Much academic hilarity ensues. Some of it in footnotes. Of course there are many, many more elements--like timelessness and some malfeasance involving a document--to this fun novel, a big reason why it’s so difficult to write about…

Favorite book by an author I’d never read. This one has to be Evgeny Chizhov’s Translation from a Literal Translation, (previous post), which I loved for Chizhov’s grace in mixing genres, making an invented country work for this skeptical reader, and effectively describing all sorts of heat. I was glad to see that Translation won the Venets award last week from the Moscow Union of Writers.

Favorite book read in English. I admit that, as per the usual, I didn’t read as many Russia(n)-related books in English during 2014 as I might have... but that doesn’t mean Soviets, by Danzig Baldaev and Sergei Vasiliev, (previous post), isn’t worthy of another mention. The combination of detailed caricatures, black and white photos, and pointed captions is well worth reading and studying. This must be my year of loving footnotes: Soviets, translated by Polly Gannon and Ast A. Moore, contains lots of helpful explanatory notes. The publisher, Fuel, continues to produce beautiful books: I’ve been saving their Soviet Space Dogs, another attractive book, as a treat. The New Year holiday may be just the right time…

Favorite travel. Everything was good this year—BookExpo America in New York, the American Literary Translators Association conference in Milwaukee, and the Congress of Literary Translators in Moscow—but I have to vote for the Congress. Not much beats a trip to Moscow that includes a visit to Andrei Platonov’s grave, speaking about translating old language in contemporary novels, and having an opportunity to see so many of “my” writers, not to mention translator colleagues from all over. It was especially fun and helpful to meet the afore-mentioned Evgeny Vodolazkin and talk about his Laurus, which I’m busily working on now…

What’s coming up in 2015? Top blogging priority is to get caught up on posts. And I’m still trying to figure out ways to capture notes and comments about some of the books I abandon. Often hundreds of pages in, like, let’s say, Zakhar Prilepin’s The Cloister, a book that offers a new aesthetic for prison camp novels but just wasn’t going anywhere for me, or Vladimir Sorokin’s Tellurium, which seemed to rehash too many Sorokin books I’d already read. I suppose one way to capture this information is to write by-the-by notes, or add a “Biggest Disappointment of the Year” paragraph to my year-end posts. I could have written that paragraph this year about Prilepin’s book, which won the Big Book Prize. I could say that Konstantin Milchin sums up my problems with The Cloister beautifully here, noting, among other things, (and I’ll paraphrase) that the novel, which is a bit lacking on the plot side, could have been 300 pages or 1,000 pages long, all to, roughly the same effect. (For the record, I read around 270 pages so didn’t come up very short on that 300 figure...) I was very happy that Milchin mentions Prilepin’s language, which hardly seems to vary among his 1920s characters, who speak in suspiciously (my word!) modern terms. I’d wondered about this but, as a non-native reader of Russian, thought maybe I was too demanding, particularly given my work on Laurus, where it’s an understatement to say the dialogue sure does vary.

A reading priority for 2015: I’m hoping to keep reminding myself to look for more books published by smaller publishers and literary journals…

Thank You! Finally, another big thank you to everyone who visits the blog, whether regularly or occasionally. Happy New Year to everyone! And happy reading!

Up Next: Vodolazkin’s Solovyov and Larionov, Marina Stepnova’s The Italian Lessons (Безобжный переулок), and Alexey Nikitin’s Victory Park, which is off to a great start… Also, a list of translations coming out in 2015. I’m taking names and titles, so send them on in now!

Disclaimers. The usual.

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

Summer Nonfiction Roundup

It’s common knowledge around here that I don’t read a lot of book-length nonfiction… but I do sometimes read—and, yes, even enjoy!—the occasional book about Russian arts and culture. Here are some quick notes on three books I’ve read or been reading this summer:

Frank Westerman’s Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, is the kind of book that makes me want to seek out more nonfiction. Not only does Westerman address an odd combination of topics that interest me—Stalin-era control over writers, how writers handled said control, and irrigation in the Soviet Union—he also presents his material at a measured pace through intersecting narrative threads.

Much of the book concerns Kara-Bogaz, part of the Caspian Sea, telling of Westerman’s efforts to travel there to see the place Konstantin Paustovsky wrote about in his novel, Kara-Bogaz (he wrote the name as Кара-Бугаз), which was adapted for screen. Along the way, Westerman offers background on Paustovsky’s life and family, Maksim Gorky, Andrei Platonov, the nasty Belomor Canal junket for writers, plus various and sundry other figures and events connected with socialist realism and social control. I think Engineers of the Soul would appeal most to general readers with an interest in water issues, socialist realism, and/or Soviet-era authors. Don’t be surprised if I read Kara-Bogaz.

Valery Panyushkin’s 12 Who Don’t Agree: The Battle for Freedom in Putin’s Russia, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz, also kept me reading. Though the book felt a little disjointed—each chapter profiles a person connected with the Russian opposition, which seems a little disjointed itself—I found lots of interesting chunks of recent history and updates on the Russia I knew in the 1990s. The portrait of Anatoly Yermolin, for example, includes bits on the so-called October Events of 1993, and Vissarion Aseyev’s story offers an account of what happened in Beslan in 2004.

One of the most affecting scenes is in the chapter on Ilya Yashin, who’s forced to get off a bus in the hinterlands during a blizzard, introduces an elderly, apolitical couple who take Yashin in for the night. When Yashin asks if they know the Yabloko party—or any other political party—the answer is “You eat and stop jabbering.” When Yashin presses a bit more and asks if they know the president, the man says, “Putin, I think?... Yeltsin’s over?”

Finally, there’s Rachel Polonsky’s Molotov’s Magic Lantern: Travels in Russian History, which I’ve been struggling with since one day last winter when the snow was so cold it sounded like Styrofoam under my feet when I went to the mailbox to find the book. I think my problem with Molotov’s Magic Lantern is that Polonsky travels so much, both around Russia and within her own mental filing cabinets, which are stuffed to bursting with names and stories related to history and literature. Though I read in small, manageable chunks and find lots of points that relate to my interests, the endless flow of data and constant zigzagging between historical periods and Polonsky’s thoughts sometimes gets so overwhelming and disorienting that I want to be a backseat driver and ask Polonsky to either slow down or let me out of the car. Despite all that, I’ve resolved that I will finish Molotov’s Magic Lantern. Polonsky’s visit to Staraya Russa—think Dostoevsky and The Brothers K.—was interesting, plus I’ve visited lots of the cities in the book and enjoy reading another traveler’s impressions of things like Cossack life outside Rostov-on-Don. My next stops include Taganrog, Arkhangel’sk, and Murmansk.

Disclaimers: A big thank you to the publishers of all the books—The Overlook Press, Europa Editions, and FSG, in that order—for supplying review copies. A big thanks, too, to Amy Henry of The Black Sheep Dances for requesting Molotov’s Magic Lantern for me from FSG. Beyond the usual disclaimers, I should add that I always enjoy speaking with Overlook, Europa, and Marian Schwartz.

Up next: I(rina) Grekova’s Кафедра (The Faculty) then Aleksei Slapovskii’s Большая книга перемен (The Big Book of Changes).

Photo credit: Space photography of Kara-Bogaz from NASA, via Wikipedia.

Baldaev’s Drawings from the Gulag: The Pain of History

Drawings from the Gulag makes explicit the capacity one individual has to destroy another. It shows how moral borders disintegrate, and how the descent into indifference can be sanctioned, justified and excused in pursuit of a flawed ideology.

-the last two lines of the introduction to Drawings from the Gulag

Danzig Baldaev’s Drawings from the Gulag is a deeply disturbing book that documents, through detailed drawings and concise captions, the horrors of the Soviet Gulag system. Drawings begins with the conception of the system, which Baldaev dates to 1917; that panel carries a dedication to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “a giant of Russian literature.” A bit of background: Baldaev lived part of his childhood in an orphanage for children of enemies of the people; he later worked as a warden in the Kresty prison in Leningrad.

Drawings from the Gulag, published by Fuel, preserves Baldaev’s descriptive Russian-language captions for each panel and provides English-language translations from Polly Gannon and Ast A. Moore, plus footnotes and quotes from other sources that decipher acronyms and offer further information. The drawings are divided into categories – e.g. journey to the camp, children, and the country becomes a Gulag – and a series of short articles in the back of the book offers additional background, including definitions of slang. By depicting political prisoners and criminals, as well as the workers who interrogated, guarded, and maltreated them, the book becomes a small pictorial dictionary of intense suffering.

I knew Drawings from the Gulag would be rough, uncomfortable reading because of its unsparing, brutal, and graphic accounts of prison camp torture, sexual abuse, and other forms of humiliation and debasement, but I wasn’t expecting it to affect me as deeply as it did. I read in small installments. Baldaev’s black-and-white drawings balance the grotesque and the realistic in each panel, revealing and releasing more pain and disdain, from his subjects (and, I suspect, Baldaev) than photos could. Many drawings include prisoners’ tattoos: Baldaev meticulously recorded the meanings of tattoos, and I’ve known his work for years because of his contributions to a Russian dictionary of prison language that has a section on tattoos.

Drawings from the Gulag is an angry book – the title for a panel on the holodomor reads “Famine – dearest child and companion of the Communist Party” – and Baldaev’s last chapter of drawings compares the Gulag system to the Holocaust. That section of the book includes pages about the sinking of barges carrying prisoners, mass killings in Kuropaty, and mass shootings of enemies of the people. Many of Baldaev’s drawings depict, with sharp irony, patriotic slogans: a prison wall quotes Beria with “The Gulag is the best correctional institution for criminals in the world.”

More than anything, I wish that life hadn’t given Baldaev – or anybody else – the experiences and raw material that inspired him to create Drawings from the Gulag. Nearly everything that I’ve tried to write about the book’s many merits feels trivial. But I will say this: given the history of the camps and the large body of Russian-language fiction that they spawned, I found in Drawings, like the dictionary to which Baldaev contributed, a very valuable account of what happened in the Gulag and the language used to describe the horrendous, unthinkable things that people did to each other.

For more: Fuel’s Web site has a small slide show of images from the book.

For a different angle on the book and further perspective on Baldaev himself: Roland Elliott Brown writes in a review in The Observer that “Viewers may also question whether the artistic merits of Baldaev’s drawings redeem their potential prurience”… and (sort of) answers his own rhetorical question about merits by comparing Baldaev’s work to that of Goya and Doré. From my perspective: Having read historical and fictional accounts of guards’ abuses of women in the camps – Aksyonov’s Generations of Winter springs to mind first – I would have been very surprised if Baldaev’s book hadn’t included sexual content.

Disclaimer: Thank you to Fuel editor Damon Murray for contacting me and sending Drawings from the Gulag.

Up Next: Afanasii Mamedov’s Фрау Шрам (Frau Scar), a not-too-long novel that takes place during the 1990s in Moscow and Baku. It’s oddly enjoyable.

Storytelling to the Nth Degree: Two of Iuzefovich’s Putilin Novels

Oy, the old unreliable narrator trick combined with the old fiction-based-on-a-real character trick! Leonid Iuzefovich’s (Yuzefovich’s) Костюм Арлекина (Harlequin’s Costume) and Дом свиданий (The Whorehouse), the first two books in a historical detective novel trilogy, have cramped my brain with layers and layers of reality and invention…

Where to start? Iuzefovich frames his novels about Putilin with a fictitious writer, Safronov, who visits post-retirement Putilin to take down stories about Putilin’s life and career. The detective stories in the books are ostensibly written by Safronov. Not so complicated.

But. The covers and descriptions of my Iuzefovich books don’t mention that their main character, Ivan Dmitrievich Putilin, was a real person who worked as chief inspector of the Saint Petersburg police during the 19^th century. Somehow I missed that tidbit when I looked at translator Marian Schwartz’s Web site: Marian has translated Harlequin’s Costume and uses the words “real life” to describe Putilin. (I bought my books after Marian mentioned the trilogy when I interviewed her in this post.)

And the plot thickens: Roman Antropov, a contemporary of Putilin who used the pseudonym Roman Dobryi (“dobryi” means nice or kind) wrote stories about Putilin’s adventures. I haven’t read Antropov’s work about the “genius” inspector, but it’s online here. Of course I wonder how Iuzefovich might have played on them. But there’s still more: According to the Russian Wikipedia page about Harlequin’s Costume, Iuzefovich used Putilin’s memoir for material; the publisher’s name was Safonov, only one letter off from the writer in Iuzefovich’s books.

To summarize: it looks like we have one real person (Putilin) appropriated for two writers’ (Iuzefovich’s, Antropov’s) fiction, one (Putilin) memoir, and at least one fictional writer (Safronov) hired by a fictional representation of Putilin. Somehow, I’m sure there’s more to learn, but I’m stopping here for now.

Which brings me to where I’d intended to start, before I realized that Putilin existed: Iuzefovich’s Putilin may be a police inspector who solves crimes, but he takes a very flexible approach to the telling the truth about his own life and stories. He’s a horribly unreliable editor of the facts of his own life; he likes a good story. At the end of the second book, for example, when Safronov and Putilin work through details of the story, Putilin suggests Safronov keep the murder victim alive and cure his limp. For his part, Safronov notices that Putilin sometimes resurrects figures he finds appealing; Safronov initially misses some details from Putilin’s stories.

As for basic plot summaries… Harlequin’s Costume blends two lines: the murder of an Austrian diplomat and the search for Vanka Pupyr, a hardened criminal who hides out with a laundress. Though the diplomat-oriented part of the novel didn’t grab me at all – I’ve never been partial to geopolitical murder mysteries – I enjoyed Pupyr’s story and many of the secondary and tertiary characters. Both books have atmospheric settings, including taverns and the port.

The Whorehouse is a very different book: Putilin’s neighbor has been killed in the title institution, and Putilin searches for his killer. Iuzefovich tosses in references to mythology and literature when Putilin attempts to decipher the meaning of a mysterious coin-like medallion that keeps turning up: the truth behind the symbols turns out to be quite earthy, resulting in a mix of high and low. Both books have a feel of slapstick and farce, but those elements were particularly strong in some of the late-night interaction between neighbors in The Whorehouse.

For me, the real appeal of the books was the Iuzefovich-Safronov version of Putilin himself. I’m not sure if I’d go so far to call Putilin schlumpy but he isn’t a dashing or glamorous figure, and he’s not hard-boiled, either. His wife pesters him about not exacerbating his stomach problems, at one point he carries a jar of mushrooms in his pocket that he claims are a revolver, and his wife locks him out because he comes home too late after sleuthing. He even slips on noodles that he drops after snacking in an apartment he’s entered (without permission), to look around. He’s sometimes on the outs with his superiors but he has strong intuition.

The Putilin-Safronov team’s filtering of the truth for the reader was the most intriguing aspect of the books for me, so it was fun to make my late discovery that Putilin existed. Putilin, in the Iuzefovich rendition, has grown on me, and I hope to read the last book of the trilogy, Князь ветра (Prince of the Wind), which won the 2001 National Bestseller award. I’d also like to take a look at Antropov’s characterization of Putilin. And maybe even Putilin’s characterization of Putilin. Or perhaps I should look into police history, which might be even more memorable: Safronov and Putilin discuss “true” details that seem implausible, yet another affirmation, albeit from a novel, that truth can be stranger than fiction.

Translation watch: Iuzefovich’s literary agent’s Web site shows translations of all three Putilin books into various languages. Translator Marian Schwartz has finished an English-language manuscript of the first book in the trilogy.

Next up: Nikolai Maslov’s graphic novel/autobiography Siberia, which contains wonderful pencil drawings; then Evgenii Kliuev’s Андерманир штук (Something Else for You), a Big Book shortlister that I’m loving after setting aside Bakhyt Kenzheev’s Обрезание пасынков (Pruning the Shoots)…

The photo of Ivan Putilin came from Wikipedia; Wikipedia references a page on murderers.ru, which contains, yes, an article about Putilin.

New York Times Article about Elena Chizhova

Today’s New York Times included an article – Ellen Barry’s “A Writer Invites Russia to Engage Its Painful Past” – about Yelena Chizhova, who won the 2009 Russian Booker Prize for the short novel Время женщин (A Time of Women). I wrote a bit about the award and novel here. It appears that the novel is still not available in book form, though it’s online here. I do not know of any English-language translations of Chizhova’s work.

A Time of Women arose out of Chizhova’s memories of hearing her mother and grandmother speak about the blockade of Leningrad. Chizhova believes the “the vast majority” of Russians aren’t very interested in Russia’s Soviet past. Chizhova says: “They do not have the feeling that history continues. It seems to them that in the 1990s, we just started over. As if we were all born then.” I saw the first stages of this phenomenon when I visited and lived in Russia during 1988-1998. What stands out most is several people telling me they believed Solzhenitsyn’s writings about prison camps were already irrelevant.

Still, Barry notes that “there is no question that the past is exerting a pull on Russian art.” Two other big 2009 literary prize winners also take place in the past: Andrei Gelasimov’s Степные боги (Steppe Gods) is set in 1945 (previous post), and Leonid Yuzefovich’s Журавли и карлики (Cranes and Dwarfs or Cranes and Pygmies) takes place during several centuries (previous post).

Barry references an article about the 2009 Booker short list by Elena Dyakova – it’s available (in Russian) here.

“War and Peace”: Book One, Part Two: First War Scenes

Russian high school students read Война и мир (War and Peace) in the tenth grade, and many people joke that the girls read Peace and the boys read War.

With a strong preference for Peace over War, I can’t deny fitting the stereotype. But I enjoy the war scenes of War and Peace more with each reading, despite continuing difficulties following troop movements. There’s so much chaos, fog, and interaction among characters that my attention doesn’t get much chance to wander.

Tolstoy ends Book One, Part One, with Prince Nikolai Bolkonskii slamming a door. He opens Book One, Part Two, with Russian troops moving into Austria. Tolstoy’s point of view changes dramatically, moving away from inner thoughts and intimate family portraits toward statements describing the history of nations: “In October of 1805 Russian troops were occupying the villages and cities of the Austrian archduchy…”

Even more jarring for me, he occasionally uses the word “наши” (ours”) to refer to Russian troops. This shift join other elements of the novel – e.g. those neutral-sounding mentions of troop movements and close-up descriptions of characters – that Tolstoy patches together to create a narrative that demonstrates the innumerable factors, people, and perspectives that contribute to history and our lives. Tolstoy’s ability to show this jumble so beautifully, both stylistically and through plot and characters’ actions, is why War and Peace has endeared itself to me so much.

Troops are described several times as “массы” (“masses”) and at least once as ants. The individual people who makes up those living masses sometimes know their places and jobs, but they are also prone to making mistakes and forgetting to convey commands. After battle, they don’t always remember what happened – witness Prince Andrei not remembering his encounter with Tushin – or might twist the truth to make themselves look better. These, and related themes, will reappear many times.

A few other elements I especially like:

-Many armies have drummers to keep soldiers in step, but how many have spoon players? My Война и мир book, a Soviet-era edition for school kids, even includes an endnote defining the word ложечник as a wooden spoon player.

-Nikolai Rostov’s battlefield expectations, then his horrifying realization that he could be killed, despite how much his family loves him.

-Price Bagration’s intuitive leadership and calming effect on his troops.

I’m interested in other opinions… Do you have a strong preference for either War or Peace? What do you think of Tolstoy’s first battle scenes?

 

“War and Peace”: The Soirée

I’d never truly enjoyed the first 20 or so pages of Lev Tolstoy’s Война и мир (War and Peace) until this, my fourth, reading. With its mix of French and Russian, introductions to many characters, and numerous references to French history, the beginning of the book can feel pretty overwhelming.

One strategy for handling the first pages is to choose a thread or two to follow. If French history is your thing, focus on those references. If you prefer character development and relationships, watch those. And don’t panic if you don’t love the soirée scenes: I never have, either, but I’ve always engaged with the book quite nicely after the party breaks up.

That said, I found myself enjoying the soirée this time around, perhaps because I focused on many of the themes Tolstoy weaves into the book. They include:

Naturalness and Artificiality – Throughout the novel, Tolstoy contrasts stage-like and natural behaviors. In the first chapter he presents a nervous, party-managing hostess, Anna Pavlovna, with the awkward, outspoken Pierre. Smiles tell a lot about the people: the lovely Ellen, for example, never stops smiling but Pierre alone, making his debut in society, has a genuine smile that is childlike and kind.

Making and Interpreting History – Anna Pavlovna speaks in the first section of the book about Russia’s potential as a savior of Europe. Tolstoy writes a great deal in War and Peace about history, its participants, and its interpretations. The book includes essays on history, and War and Peace’s fictional chapters echo many of the essays’ themes, particularly the roles of generals, soldiers, and chance. One telling little episode related to history: in Part I, section V, Pierre plops himself on a couch at Prince Andrei’s, takes Caesar’s Commentaries off a shelf, and begins reading the book in the middle.

The Narrator – War and Peace’s narrator includes a few comments that look back in time, placing events within the context of history: Anna Pavlovna’s use of the word грипп (grippe) was new at the time, Prince Vasilii speaks in the French that наши деды (our grandfathers) spoke and thought in, and the lovely Ellen is dressed in accordance with the fashion of the time. The narrator’s voice will, of course, become particularly forceful in the essays on history.

Further Reading on War and Peace:

I’ll occasionally include a link or suggestion on other readings related to War and Peace. I’ll start with a link to a favorite blog, languagehat. Languagehat has been reading War and Peace in Russian and has written some excellent posts about vocabulary and Tolstoy’s use of language.

All languagehat posts with key term “war and peace”

My favorite of the posts (thus far!), about Tolstoy’s use of repetition

War and Peace on Amazon

World War 2, Life, Fate, and Spiritual Entropy

I’m sure my experience reading Vasilii (Vasily) Grossman’s Жизнь и судьба (Life and Fate) differs significantly from the experiences of other readers: Life and Fate is so long and complex that I suspect most people, particularly first-time readers, come away with messages that reflect the portions of the book they relate to most.

This 900-page epic about the World War 2 era in the USSR was unpublishable when Grossman attempted to submit it in the early 1960s. It did not reach Soviet readers until perestroika. Life and Fate includes dozens of characters, military and civilian, free and imprisoned, Soviet and German, and Grossman draws dangerous parallels between two oppressive systems. Many characters fight for the city of Stalingrad. Others are physicists. Others are held in the Lubyanka prison or German concentration camps.

Sometimes Life and Fate felt so sprawling or crowded that I thought Grossman should have written several novels instead of trying to force all his people and ideas into one book. But there is a nucleus: the Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum, who struggles with “spiritual entropy” as Soviet science and society become increasingly politicized. Viktor and his wife Liudmila connect, with various degrees of separation, to most of the novel’s other characters through family ties.

Although I wish my Russian edition of the novel had contained a list of characters and settings, as the English translation evidently provides, I found that relaxing and accepting my commitment to read – and enjoy! – Life and Fate through the Russian Reading Challenge worked at least as well. Rather than obsessing over all the character names and traits, I focused on the people and subplots that interested me most.

There is plenty to choose from. Most passages in Life and Fate describe events in the lives of characters, but Grossman also includes an essay on war. A few chapters lack characters and feel more like journalistic pieces, reflecting Grossman’s background as a war reporter. Grossman’s writing style is generally straightforward and simple, though he occasionally hits what felt to me like off notes with gratuitous references to, for example, Avogadro’s number and certain works of Russian literature.

Life and Fate is often compared with War and Peace, and these long, loose books have obvious formal similarities. But what struck me more was the authors’ common emphasis on individuals: Grossman, for example, focuses on humanity by looking at the individuals who make up the Soviet and German military... and those who become victims of the Soviet GULag and German concentration camps.

This theme leads to the book’s best scenes, some of the most moving I’ve read in years: a letter from a doomed woman to her son (Part 1, chapter 18), an account of being led to death in a gas chamber (Part 2, chapters 45-50), and a scene of encircled German troops at Christmas (Part 3, chapter 36-37). I recommend these scenes highly to all readers, whether or not they read the entire book.

Shtrum’s spiritual entropy and intense loneliness as he struggles with his own moral decisions and fate as a theoretical scientist left an overwhelming impression, too. Observing the effects of fear, acceptance, and relief on his actions was not easy – these sections centering around the egocentric Shtrum were both emotional and a little drawn-out – but I added more depth to my readings of the psychology of professional and personal survival during the Stalin era.

My overall feelings about Life and Fate are mixed: in spite of some beautifully composed scenes and interesting characters, the hundreds of chapters don’t always quite hold together, and some characters inevitably felt a little stereotypical or unnuanced.

Despite its minor imperfections – which are hardly surprising for a novel of the bulk and scope of Life and Fate – Grossman’s descriptions felt so immediate that I often had trouble putting the book down to cook dinner or go to sleep. And I enjoyed considering the many painful ideas the book presented, particularly the politicization of the Soviet military and society, and the accompanying moral dilemmas for people who wanted to be good citizens but think for themselves, even during wartime.

Life and Fate deserves respect, attention, and readers. It addresses questions of freedom, morals, and politics that – as recent news shows – still burn today. If you decide to read Life and Fate, I suggest finding an edition with a list of characters… and then choosing a few people or plot lines to specialize in if the book threatens to overwhelm you. It’s worth the time and the effort, and you may, as I do, feel that you’ll want to read it again some day so you can learn more.

Summary: I highly recommend Life and Fate to readers interested in totalitarianism, the World War 2 era in the Soviet Union, and moral decisions. Although the novel sometimes feels overloaded with places and characters, some of whom flit in and out of the narrative, I appreciate the care with which Grossman describes people and their situations.

For further reading:

Robert Chandlers’s introduction to his translation of Life and Fate

Review of Life and Fate in London Review of Books

“Under Siege,” by Keith Gessen, from The New Yorker

Life and Fate on Wikipedia (includes summaries)

Short stories translated by Andrew Glikin-Guskinsky, winner of the 2007 Pushkin Poetry Prize for Translation, are available on Sovlit.com: “The Resident” “In the Country” “A Tale About Happiness” “In the War”

“In the Main Line of Attack” is anonymously translated nonfiction, by Grossman, about Stalingrad.

Life and Fate on Amazon.com

(Cross-posted on Russian Reading Challenge.)