Snowy Day (Yet Again!) Potpourri: Two News Items & Two Books

First, two brief news items...

This year’s Prix Russophonie went to Hélène Henri-Safier for her French translation of Dmitrii Bykov’s Pasternak. Henri-Safier’s translation of Pasternak also won the 2012 Read Russia award, in the contemporary literature category. Further details about the Prix Russophonie are online here. Other finalists for the prize translated Mandelshtam, Tsvetaeva, Girshovich, and a band of OBERIU writers.

Poet, translator, and publisher Maksim Amelin won the Solzhenitsyn Prize today. Several of Amelin’s poems are included in the bilingual collection Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Evgeny Bunimovich and Jim Kates; the book is from Dalkey Archive.

Now, two brief notes on books…

Konstantin Flavitskii's not-quite-real account.

Grigorii Danilevskii’s Княжна Тараканова (Princess Tarakanova where the princess word means a prince’s unmarried daughter, oy, oy, oy!) is an 1883 historical novel about the demise of pretendress Elizaveta Tarakanova, who claimed to be the daughter of Empress Elizabeth. Danilevskii tells his version of the story in two parts: the first is the diary of naval lieutenant Pavel Kontsov, who meets Tarakanova after he escapes from an Istanbul prison; his previous adventures include serving in the Battle of Chesma in 1770. True to his time, Kontsov tells his story as a confession of sorts, mentions Kheraskov (!), and experiences perils both sentimental and maritime. Kontsov writes his diary in 1775 on a ship, The Northern Eagle, stuffing the pages into a bottle that he tosses overboard during a storm he fears will wreck the ship.

Do not fear, dear readers: the bottle and the diary are, of course, found in the second half of the book! The second section, told in a rather bland third-person narrative, also includes scenes of the captured Tarakanova in Peter and Paul Fortress and a wrapping up of various loose ends from Kontsov’s story. Catherine the Great is also present. All in all, I wouldn’t say Princess Tarakanova is great literature but it made for moderately entertaining, easy reading on tired evenings. The highlight was Danilevskii’s nineteenth-century take on the eighteenth century.

An Armenian Sketchbook is Vasily Grossman’s Добро вам, literally Good to You, in a translation from Robert and Elizabeth Chandler; I read the Chandlers’ translation. Grossman wrote An Armenian Sketchbook about his 1961 travel to Armenia, where he went to rewrite a literal Armenian-Russian translation of a novel by Hrachya Kochar. Grossman hardly writes about the work, the writer, or the translator—I’ll admit this was, initially, a disappointment for me—but I found his descriptions of and reflections on things like Armenia’s stone (“Here, we were still in the Stone Age.”), poverty, history, and trout surprisingly absorbing. In describing village life, for example, Grossman catalogues certain residents’ criminal activity and I scribbled in the margins that the passage reads like true-life чернуха, that dark naturalism I’ve mentioned so many times before.

Robert Chandler and Yuri Bit-Yunan’s very helpful introduction to An Armenian Sketchbook notes the “deeply personal” and spontaneous nature of the writing in Sketchbook and mentions that Grossman was, at the time, in the early stages of cancer, which caused him physical difficulties that are detailed in the book. Mortality is a frequent motif and in one scene, after some heavy drinking, Grossman writes, “At this point I realized that I was dying.” He describes some of these sensations—his “I,” for example, separating from his physical body, and aloneness—then, two pages later writes, “If the world were not so beautiful, the anguish of a dying man would not be so terrible, so incomparably more terrible than any other experiences.” Grossman closes Sketchbook with some lovely descriptions of a wedding that culminates, at least in Grossman’s account, in a dance with candles. Two of his last lines are, “Probably I have said much that is clumsy and wrong. But all I have said, clumsy or not, I have said with love.” I think it’s that love, along with the spontaneity that Chandler and Bit-Yunan mention in their introduction, that appealed to me so much in An Armenian Sketchbook.

Disclosures: The usual for the news items. I received a copy of An Armenian Sketchbook from the publisher, New York Review Books; I am collaborating with Robert Chandler on a story by Andrei Platonov for a collection that NYRB will publish.

Up Next: Ekaterina Sherga’s The Underground Ship, which just took an interesting turn. And maybe favorites from the letter R… we’ll see.

Grossman’s Mysterious Everything Flows

It’s never easy to write about unfinished books, and the difficulty multiplies when the book is as serious in subject and diverse in form as Vasilii Grossman’s Всё течёт (Everything Flows): Grossman writes about history, freedom, and Soviet prison camps, incorporating a combination of fictional characters and essay-like passages. The main narrative line in Everything Flows concerns Ivan Grigorievich, who is released from prison after 30 years, but Grossman interrupts Ivan’s story many times to describe and illustrate aspects of Soviet totalitarianism.

I admit: I get frustrated when a book moves so much between different types of narration. I admit: I didn’t read all the portions on history very carefully. And I’ll also admit: I’m one of those ridiculously stubborn readers who gets used to a character and then wants to stay with him or her. And Ivan’s story is compelling. Grossman shows us, with heartbreaking details large and small, Ivan’s awkwardness as he returns to “everyday” life outside the camps. He doesn’t fit with the parquet floor and chandeliers at his cousin’s apartment, and he feels that both he and Leningrad have changed. Though life outside the camps is frightening, he prefers freedom.

Grossman also tells of wives imprisoned for refusing to denounce their husbands. And a woman Ivan lives with tells of her experiences during the Ukrainian holodomor. Grossman makes their stories so immediate and poignant that I didn’t want to leave them, either. Robert Chandler, who translated Everything Flows for New York Review Books with Elizabeth Chandler and Anna Aslanyan, says in an interview with Book Serf that there is something distinctive about Grossman’s “vivid” selection of details. Those details – as varied as protruding lower teeth, Ivan’s job in a locksmith workshop, and the whitewashing of walls in houses where people died during the holodomor – result in writing that is both lyrical and documentary.

The long passages about Lenin, Stalin, and freedom, and a sketch composed of dialogue held my interest far less than the purely fictional chapters, despite Grossman’s choice of subjects: informants, Lenin, Stalin, and what they did to the Soviet Union. Toward the end, Grossman stresses that human history is the history of freedom.

The book cohered for me, rather mysteriously, in its last two pages, when Ivan returned to his father’s home. Somehow, all the disparate pieces and figures in Everything Flows ended up melding into something bigger, probably because Grossman’s conclusions about humanity and freedom were so movingly generous in acknowledging human flaws that they left me with a lump in my throat.

Everything Flows is, like Life and Fate, (previous post), not an easy book to read, and it’s probably obvious that I don’t feel very comfortable writing about it, but I think the fictional passages alone make it worth reading. Readers who prefer nonfiction might say the same about the passages about history.

Level for Nonnative Readers of Russian: 3/5, medium difficulty.

For more:

“Anti-Socialist Realism” on TNR.com

A review of Everything Flows from The Guardian

Also: The Road, a collection of Grossman’s fiction and nonfiction, translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Mukovnikova, will be available from New York Review Books in late September 2010.

Next up: Vladimir Sorokin’s Sugar Kremlin, then two detective novels by Leonid Iuzefovich.

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.)

Russian Reading Challenge 2008

Are there four Russian novels, plays, story collections, or other books that you've always meant to read but never found time for? I'm sure there are! 2008 is your year.

The Russian Reading Challenge 2008 blog encourages visitors to read four Russian-related books between January 1 and December 31, 2008. The best part about the challenge format is that nobody will be alone -- dozens of participants should mean lots of discussion.

I'm going to use the Challenge as a way to assuage my guilt about missing these classics for too long:

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Бесы (The Possessed)

Nikolai Gogol’s Ревизор (Inspector General) plus stories I haven’t read in Вечера на хуторе близ Диканьки (Village Evenings near Dikanka -- not the video game!) and Миргород (Mirgorod)

Vasilii Grossman’s Жизнь и судьба (Life and Fate)

Andrei Platonov’s Котлован (Foundation Pit) or, as a backup, Ювенильное море (Juvenile Sea)

For now I'm reading and enjoying Sergei Dovlatov's Компромисс (The Compromise), a very funny-but-sad autobiographical novel about working as a journalist in Soviet Estonia. A friend lent me four volumes of Dovlatov -- t0 be sure I'd find something I liked! -- and I may be reading it all cover-to-cover if everything is this good.