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.

Farewell to Vladimir Voinovich

I was very sad to learn on Friday evening that Vladimir Voinovich had died. I haven’t read Voinovich in nearly a decade but I’ve enjoyed his books since the 1980s, first in translation—I believe Richard Lourie’s Moscow 2042 translation was the first Voinovich book I read—and then in Russian, where I think I first read “Хочу быть честным” (“I Want to Be Honest”), which is also one of the first medium-sized works of Russian literature I read for fun. I read Voinovich most recently in 2009, when I thoroughly enjoyed his Шапка (The Fur Hat) (previous post).

My early reading of Voinovich is certainly one reason I feel a certain sentimental attachment to his writing—his satire was biting and being able to enjoy it felt like a gift—though I’m sure that hearing him read at a very small Moscow gathering in the 1990s helped, too. I didn’t know him or even speak with him that evening but, as often happens after author readings, I felt closer to his work because I heard his voice and saw his mannerisms and reactions. Northwestern University Press’s description of Richard Lourie’s Pretender to the Throne translation sums up, in five words, what I’ve always so appreciated about Voinovich: “dissident conscience and universal humor.”

Voinovich’s death feels very much like the end of an era, though that’s not just because he was 85 and so few writers of his generation are still with us. I’m also afraid that younger readers aren’t as familiar with his books (and books by other Soviet-era dissidents, too) as they might be. I remember lending Chonkin books to two twenty-something Russians during the 2000s: neither had heard of Voinovich but both thoroughly enjoyed the reading. I hope Voinovich continues to be read. I also wish there were an afterlife with a special pneumatic tube for sending us work by departed writers. I can only imagine that Voinovich’s accounts of heaven/hell/limbo would be a lot of fun to read.

Other previous posts about Voinovich:

2042

Favorite Russian Writers (В/V)

Up next: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M., and Vladimir Sharov’s The Rehearsals in Oliver Ready’s translation. And Vladimir Danikhnov’s weird Lullaby, a Booker finalist about serial killings that has shades of Platonov. And Grigory Sluzhitel’s Дни Савелия, literally Savely’s Days, narrated by a Moscow cat. I’m also working on my Big Book reading, with Alexander Arkhangelsky’s Бюро проверки (Verification Bureau).

The 2016 NOSE Award Longlist

Thank goodness for the NOSE Award longlist! I have to admit that a rainy Saturday and a windy, blustery Sunday weren’t very conducive to writing trip reports or book reports… but an award longlist (oops, almost a “lostlist”) feels like just the thing. And the NOSE Award—a program of the Prokhorov Foundation—is always a quirky matter (I still don’t quite understand the NOSE), whether we’re talking about a longlist, shortlist, or award final, and that makes NOSE all the more appealing today. Beyond that, there’s not much time to post the list: the shortlist is apparently on the express, scheduled for debate and arrival on November 2. So here’s the whole longlist, in the order presented on the Prokhorov Foundation site and with my completely inconsistent transliterations of names:

• Yuri Buida’s Цейлон (Ceylon), which has already hit other longlists and which I’ve read (previous post).
• Eugene Vodolazkin’s Авиатор (The Aviator), which is already on the Big Book shortlist and which I’m already translating and loving all over again (previous post).
• Polina Zherebtsova’s Тонкая серебристая нить (Thin Silver Thread) is a collection of stories about civilian life in Grozny during the Chechen Wars. Brief extracts from Zherebtsova’s diary (NB: this is a different book!).
• Kirill Kobrin’s Шерлок Холмс и рождение современности. Деньги, девушки, денди Викторианской Эпохи (Sherlock Holmes and the Birth of Modernity. Money, Young Women, and Dandies of the Victorian Epoch) is nonfiction that the title and this excerpt explain.
• Sergei Kuznetsov’s Калейдоскоп (excerpt) (Kaleidoscope) involves dozens of characters and their stories, set in the twentieth century; one of my Goodreads friends noted sex and vampires. This one sounded interesting from the start but for some reason hearing it described—in a positive way, mind you—as “Pynchon lite” more than once in Moscow intrigues me all the more.
• Vladimir Martynov’s Книга Перемен (The Book of Changes) is described as more of a palimpsest than a book and as a sort of hypertext for hyperreading that uses zapping and (appropriately enough, I suppose) fortune telling practices from that other The Book of Changes. I was an I Ching fan as a teenager and don’t want to sound dismissive but, hmm.
• Aleksandra Petrova’s Аппендикс (excerpt) (The Appendix, in a metaphorical sense, it seems) is a novel about Rome. (A review)
• Moshe Shanin’s Левоплоссковские. Правоплоссковские (The title refer to residents of the villages of Levoplosskaya and Pravoplosskaya) is a collection of stories written by a young writer—he was a Debut winner for short fiction in 2014—from Severodvinsk, which interests me from the start because of my many visits to Arkhangelsk.
• Vladimir Voinovich’s Малиновый пеликан (excerpt) (The Raspberry Pelican, perhaps referring to the bird’s color, based on the cover…) is more Voinovich satire with absurdity.
• Dmitrii Lipskerov’s О нем и о бабочках (expert from GQ) (Lipskerov reads from the book on YouTube) (About Him and About Butterflies/Moths/Bow Ties, I’m betting on the lepidoptera, based on a reader review and other factors…) seems to be about a man who loses, ahem, intimate anatomy. The GQ excerpt intro compares it to Gogol’s “The Nose,” one of my all-time favorites, and it’s obvious why, even just skimming the excerpt.
• Igor Sakhnovsky’s Свобода по умолчанию (Freedom by Default) is apparently a novel about love, internal freedom, and political absurdity.
• Vasilii Avchenko’s Кристалл в прозрачной оправе (Crystal in a Transparent Frame) carries the subtitle “lyrical lectures about water and stones,” and Avchenko is said to cover many aspects of life in Vladivostok, including fish(ing), as in this excerpt. Ocean lover that I am, I bought this one after it hit the 2016 NatsBest shortlist.
• Aleksei Zikmund’s Карело-финский дневник (Karelian-Finnish Diary) is a bit of a mystery…
• Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Тимошина проза (Timosha’s Prose), which I read and don’t quite know how to describe… it’s a detached but close narrative about a young man. The novel lacks the, hmm, snap and pop (and crackle, too, I suppose) of Zaionchkovsky’s previous books.
• Boris Lego’s Сумеречные рассказы (Dusky Stories) is a collection of nineteen Russian gothic stories; a cover blurb calls it the scariest book of the year…
• Sergei Lebedev’s Люди августа (People of August, click through for synopsis and excerpt) is also on the 2016 Booker shortlist.
• Andrei Shary’s Дунай. Река империй (The Dunai. River of Empires, okay fine, The Danube…) has a lovely cover (I like old maps) and looks at history and the Danube over three millennia.
• Ivan Shipnigov’s Нефть, метель и другие веселые боги (Oil, Blizzard, and Other Cheerful Gods) is a collection of stories in which, according to the publisher, oil is the most cheerful of the Gods or gods, I’m not sure which, particularly since the publisher also compares Shipnigov’s prose to the young Pelevin’s. Here’s a sample story from the collection.

Up Next: Trip reports (Moscow and Oakland), the afore-mentioned Zaionchkovsky book and Alexander Snegirev’s patient Faith/Vera, more award news, and other Big Book finalists, though this second half of the list brings me little joy and much left unfinished…

Disclaimers and disclosures. The usual, plus translating that Vodolazkin book and the fact of support for my translation work from Prokhorov Foundation grants.

How Far Away Is 2042? & Misc.

Though Vladimir Voinovich’s (Москва 2042) Moscow 2042 doesn’t feel quite as fresh now as it did when it came out in the ‘80s – will people anywhere watch TV in 2042? – it’s still plenty fun, and it still feels painfully relevant. I think the last name of one of the characters, “Karnavalov,” sums up a lot about the book: this satirical, dystopian novel written by an exiled writer certainly serves up a nice dose of carnival and, of course, absurdity.

So what happens? In 1982, Kartsev, a Russian writer living in Germany, boards a special Lufthansa flight that takes him to 2042 Moscow. Some of Kartsev’s acquaintances from his years in the Soviet Union – including Sim Simych Karnavalov, a reclusive writer who rather resembles Solzhenitsyn – express interest in his travel. I don’t think it will surprise many readers when they reappear in 2042 Moscow. Moscow in 2042 is ruled by a leader called the Genialissimus whose real name (sort of) is Berii Ilich Vzroslyi. His first two names refer to past leaders, and his last translates to “adult.” The names are part of the book’s fun: other characters include Dzerzhin (from Dzerzhinskii) and Gorizont (horizon).

Voinovich works a lot into less than 400 pages. There’s Kartsev’s writerly jealously of Karnavalov, a 2042 regime that combines religion with politics (hmm…), very funny scenes of collective writing processes, reflections on reality, and lots of poop humor. I’ll take Voinovich’s writing about “secondary” material over Sorokin’s any day, particularly since most of it – such as Kartsev finding himself in the “Third Kaka” – makes a point without being ponderous. Citizens in 2042 turn in their waste so they may eat… and there are multiple mentions of that staple Russian food, sausage. Moscow 2042 also includes references to classic literature, a special showing of Dallas, word play in the names of communist institutions, and a special isolation for Moscow. I don’t want to write more, lest I spoil the fun. I’ve always enjoyed Voinovich and would certainly recommend Moscow 2042 to anyone who enjoys dystopian satire, a bit of time travel, and humor both high and low. Moscow 2042 is available in translation.

The Big Book Award announced today that Viktor Pelevin’s t won its readers’ choice award; 8,615 readers voted over the Internet. Evgenii Kliuev’s Андерманир штук (Something Else for You) was second-most popular among readers; the book was a little too messy and wandering for me to love but I’m sure it won readers over with its magical atmosphere and positivity (previous post). Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Чертово колесо (The Devil’s Wheel), which I did love, took third (previous post). The jury’s selections will be named tomorrow.

My blogger colleague Marie Cloutier, a.k.a. Boston Bibliophile, interviewed me as part of her November Russo-Biblio Extravaganza. I thoroughly enjoyed answering her questions but it’s been even more fun reading her takes on some Russian books I should read one of these days. I’m especially looking forward to her thoughts on Moscow 2042.

Up Next: I’m still mulling over Dovlatov’s underwhelming Zone and working my way through Baldaev’s Drawings from the Gulag, a unique and important book that I’ve been reading in small installments. I’m continuing the theme by rereading Solzhenitsyn’s (In) The First Circle. More immediately: I’ll report on the Big Book Award winners tomorrow…

Sausage photo credit: adauzie, via sxc.hu

Out of Gogol's "Overcoat": Voinovich's "Fur Hat"

Okay. I admit that “Soviet-era satire” probably sounds, to many readers, like a tired, irrelevant genre these days. But Vladimir Voinovich’s Шапка (The Fur Hat) is a wonderful piece of perestroika-era work that combines light, humorous writing with absurdity and serious insights into how we determine self-worth. I say “we” because, despite the Soviet setting and numerous colorful characters, this novella is about all of us.

The Fur Hat concerns a writer, Efim Rakhlin, who avoids political trouble by focusing his novels on “хорошие люди,” good people, decent people, who wind up in ridiculously difficult adventures in remote locations and become heroes. Rakhlin’s research takes him to the exotic reaches of the Soviet Union, where oil industry workers, cave explorers, and other locals reward him with gifts that decorate his apartment. Things like a taxidermied penguin.

Unfortunately, poor Efim is probably not even quite what we think of as a midlist author so, when the Writers’ Union decides to give each member a fur hat, Efim is disappointed with what the union offers him. Writers with far less output than Efim’s 11 books receive far better fur. The low-level gift incenses Efim so much that his search for what he perceives as justice eventually leads to a man-bites-man episode and a not-so-happy ending.

Why is Efim so unhappy about the low-rent hat? I’m sure symbolism has something to do with it: a hat warms the head, the writer’s most valued asset. More concretely, here’s the second part of a sentence about Efim’s thoughts on Chekhov. It provides a sample of Efim’s opinion of himself (translation is mine):

“…но, читая Чехова, он каждый раз приходил к мысли, что ничего особенного в чеховских писаниях нет, и он, Рахлин, пишет не хуже, а, может быть, даже немного лучше.

“…but reading Chekhov, he came to the conclusion every time that there was nothing special in Chekhov’s writings and that he, Rakhlin, writes no worse, and maybe even a little better.”

Readers familiar with Nikolai Gogol’s story “Шинель” (“The Overcoat”) (previous post) probably already hear echoes of Akakii Akakeivich, the impoverished copy clerk who needs a new winter coat. Several scenes in The Fur Hat resurrected Akakii Akakeivich for me, especially one when Efim walks through light, dry snow like an old man, weighted down by his mood and a briefcase full of his own books about good people. Later, when his condition reaches its nadir, he, a writer, also begins copying, albeit in a different way: writing down, verbatim, what people say around him in a meeting.

The Fur Hat is a short, easy, and (dare I say it?) fun book to read with some very enjoyable set pieces and vivid examples of hypocrisy and human ambition. Voinovich weaves in a lot more, including anti-Semitism, funny names, and relations with the West. What I love most about Voinovich’s writing, though, is that he makes it easy for us – yes, that’s you and I – to laugh at ourselves even as we think “Ouch!” when we recognize bits of ourselves in Rakhlin and his colleagues, and begin to question our own behavior.

Favorite Russian Writers A to Я: Voinovich

Third up in “A to Я”: the Russian letter В, V in the Roman alphabet. This isn’t an especially high-volume letter for writers, but it does include one of my true favorites: Vladimir Voinovich. Hearing Voinovich read one night in Moscow made me enjoy his writing even more. I don’t remember what he read that evening but I remember how his authorial presence and voice filled the room. I hear that voice when I read his books.

Voinovich is best known for his novel Жизнь и необычайные приключения солдата Ивана Чонкина (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin), an account of a rather simple soldier’s experiences guarding an airplane in a village. Voinovich calls Chonkin a “роман-анекдот,” a novel-joke, and it’s very, very funny, whether you want to call it absurd, satirical, or sardonic, the word Victor Terras uses in A History of Russian Literature.

Voinovich has written plenty of other books, including Претендент на престол (Pretender to the Throne), a Chonkin sequel that I’ve been saving for when I’m grumpy and need some guaranteed laughs, and Москва 2042 (Moscow 2042), a political satire that I enjoyed many years ago. I also liked much of the uneven Монументальная пропаганда (Monumental Propaganda), in which a woman brings a Stalin statue into her apartment. The long story “Хочу быть честным” (“I Want to Be Honest”) is a vague, sentimental memory that I barely recall because I read it so long ago: it was one of the first contemporary Russian stories that I read for fun.

Another sentimental favorite is Julia Voznesenskaya’s Женский декамерон (The Women’s Decameron), which I read and loved at least twice in Russian, once in English. Voznesenskaya shifts the structure of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron to a Soviet maternity hospital, where 10 women are quarantined for 10 days. The brevity of the episodes made the book a perfect way to ease into reading in Russian, and several of the stories and characters have stayed with me over the years. Unfortunately, the box with my copy of the book got lost between Moscow and Maine, along with The Brothers Karamazov, Lolita, and training manuals about evaluating government-funded projects… what a combination of reading!

The V-List for Future Reading: Beyond Pretender to the Throne, I will read Voinovich’s Шапка (The Fur Hat) one of these years. There’s another V-authored clothing story in my future: Boris Vakhtin’s Дублёнка (The Sheepskin Coat), which is in a Metropol book I recently bought. Vakhtin is the son of Vera Panova, another favorite, so I’m looking forward to reading his work.

One day I will also read Anastasia Verbitskaia’s Ключи счастья (Keys of Happiness) and take another look at Maksimilian Voloshin’s poetry… Please add comments with other recommendations. 

To finish, here’s a favorite song from actor, singer, and writer Vladimir Vysotskii: “Большой каретный” (“Big Karetnyi”), named after a Moscow street: “Большой каретный”

Voznesenskaya on Amazon

Voinovich on Amazon

Vakhtin on Amazon

Vysotsky on Amazon

Бестселлеры -- Bestsellers, Moscow-style

Bestselling books last week at Moscow's Biblio-Globus? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, a cookbook for the lazy, plus self-help books on smoking cessation, talking to your child, career advice for women, and how rational people make stupid mistakes that can ruin their lives.

That's not all, of course. Romance and detectives were represented, too, and there were some translations from French plus, of all things, William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

There was also a little space for Russian literary fiction... whatever that means:

Vladimir Voinovich recently published his third (and final, he says) novel about Private Ivan Chonkin. The Chonkin books are Soviet classics, satires about Soviet life and bureaucracy that are easier read than described. I also enjoyed Voinovich's Монументальная пропаганда (Monumental Propaganda), which picks up a tangent from the Chonkin books. Here's what I wrote about it for a literature workshop:

Vladimir Voinovich’s Monumental Propaganda isn’t a Soviet-era work but this satire begins in the 1940s and ends in the ‘90s, covering the life of a woman who likes Stalin so much that she has a statue of him put up in her city. When the statue is taken down during the Khrushchev era, she brings it to her apartment, where she cleans and talks to it. The book lags a bit in the beginning (despite a lot of humor) but is a good portrait of someone who sticks by the Stalin mythology – I saw people like this character marching in the streets of Moscow and found the book very believable in its look at how politics affects real lives. Voinovich is extremely popular; his Chonkin books are must-reads, and some of his short stories are also very good.

Evgenii Grishkovets's Следы на мне (Traces on Me)is a collection of short stories. Here's my translation of part of the description on Biblio-Globus: "Grishkovets discusses people who played an important role in his life. Some stories, some events -- nothing exotic. Impressions and experiences that are more important than events." The focus is not on the book's "heroes" but on life and self, adds the summary.

It's oddly frustrating for a writer to read Grishkovets: I think many of us probably think we could have written his books and stories. They feel very simple, in both style and content. But that simplicity -- and, even more important, an unabashed sincerity -- have made Grishkovets uniquely popular. He examines small things in life that almost any reader can relate to: waking up and feeling like you're sick, obsession with being in love, or finding a pre-warmed seat on public transportation. Russians enjoy Grishkovets's writing, music, and stage productions enough that I've seen him in American Express ads. (Member since when, you wonder? I don't remember.) I particularly like Grishkovets's spoken songs and think his short novel, Рубашка (The Shirt), would do well in translation. It is also a nice book for students of Russian because it is short and fairly easy to read.

Post Scriptum: Perennial Bestsellers. Sergei Luk'ianenko and Dar'ia Dontsova are also on the list. Luk'ianenko wrote Ночной дозор (Night Watch) and its sequels, which have been adapted into two blockbuster Russian films that fall somewhere into the science fiction and fantasy realms. They show the struggle between people representing light and dark, though Luk'ianenko says they are better described as altruists and egoists. I read the first half of the first book and thought it was just okay. It quickly felt repetitive (or perhaps predictable), though I rather liked the casual narrative voice.

Dontsova has written several series of "ironic detective" novels with (translated) titles like Kama Sutra for Mickey Mouse and The Frog of the Baskervilles. She is fantastically popular, in large part, I suspect, because her books are optimistic and show everyday women of various social classes solving crimes, lovin' it at McDonald's, and holding extended households together. Dontsova's books are not literary (or likely to be translated), and I've found that some of them could use more editing, but they're predictable in a good way: she doesn't stray from her genre, and all the books I've read wrap up happily.

At the end of a busy and stressful day, many Russian women want something light, not a postmodern prize winner. Incidentally, optimism is a big part of Dontsova's life: I first learned about her when she was on a Russian talk show, speaking about how she survived cancer. Dontsova's best-selling book this time around is the cookbook for lazy people!

In this posting:
Vladimir Voinovich Books on Amazon
Night Watch on Amazon