Living on the Edge: Margarita Khemlin’s Krainii

I have a horrible case of чемоданное настроение – “suitcase mood,” being antsy to travel – but want to write about Margarita Khemlin’s novel Крайний before I forget everything I want to say about the book… I apologize for this slapdash post, particularly since I don’t mean to give Krainii short shrift: it’s a good book. Though it’s not my favorite piece of Khemlin’s work that’s largely because I loved her Klotsvog (previous post) so very much. Krainii is a grittily powerful first-person narrative, a life story told by a Jewish man, Nisl Moiseevich Zaidenband, who grew up in Oster, in central Ukraine, and was a partisan as a teenager during World War 2.

Nisl is a loner, and the book is a confession of sorts. He tells us on the first page that he has no “collective” to hear his story, meaning we, his readers, all of humanity who will listen, become his people. The word in the book’s title, Krainii, has multiple meanings that relate to Nisl: the Oxford Russian-English dictionary’s suggestions include words like extreme, last, uttermost, and, for sports, outside. The root word край (krai) is often used for edges and brinks; it’s also used for regions. Krainii can refer to the last person in line, and one of you who read the book suggested “fall guy,” also very fitting for this context.

Khemlin inserts lots of treacherous edges and brinks into Krainii. Oster is near the USSR’s western border and people speak a mix of languages; that occasionally put me on the linguistic brink. Nisl’s life history reads like a series of close scrapes with wartime death, the law, and the difficulties of being Jewish. His teenagedom includes hearing Nazi troops kill the Jewish population of Oster, and his escape involves help from an unexpected source and using an assumed name that hides his identity. He learns the useful craft of haircutting from older partisans. After the war Nisl commits a crime, making himself a wanted man; a partisan friend helps, hiding him the woods, essentially making him a partisan again, living away from society. Nisl survives again.

Khemlin works plenty more into Krainii: Nisl is reunited with his parents after the war, tries to establish relationships with women, and lives with an elderly Jewish couple. The Holocaust subject of soap made from human fat comes up when Nisl takes possession of bars of soap, leading to some emotional scenes. Some of the book’s most striking passages – particularly about the elderly couple and their house, and an eerie double death – made me realize, yet again, that I’m probably missing allusions to Jewish storytelling, traditions, and mysticism. Or maybe not? I don’t know. I have a few books on my shelves to broaden my knowledge – Sholom Aleichem stories and I.B. Singer novels among them – and am planning to mine the Yiddish literature posts on Wuthering Expectations, too. I’m open to suggestions, particularly if you have a favorite novel to recommend!

Level for Non-Native readers of Russian: 4/5. Some passages are very easy to read, others are difficult because of mixed language.

Up Next: I hope to queue up a quick post about Vladimir Sorokin’s Путь Бро (Bro), which I found silly but painfully absorbing, before I leave. After that, I’m not sure: I’ll try to post from London about the book fair but may not have much time. My next book post will likely be about Aleksandr Snegirev’s Тщеславие (Vanity): I’m enjoying Vanity’s very humorous account of finalists for a young writers’ book award. They’re at a rest house outside Moscow for literary seminars, which brings back lots of memories of workshops at rest houses with lousy food and after-hours parties… it’s just the thing for my suitcase mood.

Disclosure: I’ve translated one of Margarita Khemlin’s stories.

War Stories for Victory Day: Another Grekova Novella & a Sorokin Short Story

With so many news articles about this year’s Victory Day parade in Moscow, I’ve been thinking a lot about World War 2 and Russian fiction related to the war. I hadn’t realized until this week how many novels with war themes I’ve read in the last several years. I wrote a Victory Day post two years ago (here) and will add to my list of favorites at the end of this entry.

I just finished reading two pieces about the war: Irina Grekova’s 1969 novella Маленький Гарусов (Little Garusov) and Vladimir Sorokin’s short story “Кисет” (“The Tobacco Pouch”), from a collection dated 1979-1984. Little Garusov tells the story of a boy orphaned during the war who never quite grows, physically or emotionally. Garusov has a similar feel to the two other Grekova novellas (here and here) that I’ve read: clear, simple language, straightforward narrative, and a combination of light and heavy details that make the piece feel like life.

Though I agree with Helena Goscilo’s criticism (in this detailed introduction to Cathy Porter’s translation of Grekova’s Вдовий пароход (The Ship of Widows)) that Garusov meanders, I still found it an interesting portrait of the short- and long-term effects of the war on children. As a small child in wartime, Garusov often acts like an adult: he catches a crow and brings it to his mother for soup then, later, after she disappears and he’s sent to an orphanage that’s evacuated for the duration, he articulately convinces authorities to send him and his orphanage mates back to Leningrad. He wants to find his mother.

As an adult, Garusov marries and divorces, falls for “other” women, often feeling pity for them and lending money he doesn’t have. He can’t find happiness. He doesn’t know when he was born. His life is pretty empty. And sad. Garusov reminded me a lot of Liudmila Ulitskaya’s Искренне ваш Шурик (Sincerely Yours, Shurik), also about a youngish man who can’t quite seem to find his own life. Shurik was my favorite Ulitskaya novel until I read her Даниэль Штайн, переводчик (Daniel Stein, Translator) (previous post), another book with World War 2 themes.

Today I read Vladimir Sorokin’s “Tobacco Pouch” thanks to a recommendation from readers Languagehat and Alexander/Sashura; Sashura mentioned the story in a comment to this Languagehat post about Elif Batuman’s The Possessed. “The Tobacco Pouch” begins with a narrator, who loves the Russian forest, going to wait for sunrise in the woods. I’ve only read a bit of Sorokin – Лёд (Ice) (previous post) and a few stories, including “Чёрная лошадь с белым глазом” (“Black Horse with a White Eye”) (mentioned here) – but the idyllic, even kitschy, start of “Tobacco Pouch” made me wonder what sinister twist awaited in the woods.

I didn’t have to wait long: several pages in, a veteran with a chest full of medals appears. He’s out collecting plants and he carries a tobacco pouch given to him by a woman when he was a soldier. Then comes the twist: the sunrise lover asks the veteran to tell about the tobacco pouch, and the veteran’s speech eventually self-destructs (I borrowed that word from a small chunk of this interesting Russian essay about Sorokin) as he tells about his life after Victory Day in Berlin. “The Tobacco Pouch” reminded me a little of Gogol’s “Записки сумашедшего” (“Diary of a Madman”), where the narrator loses more and more of his mind as the story progresses.

One especially interesting aspect of the story: Sashura mentioned “Кисет” in a comment on an earlier Languagehat post, calling lily of the valley (ландыш), which the veteran gathers, a clue to the story’s meaning. Lily of the valley is the plant in the online version of the story but in my book, the veteran collects подснежники, snowdrops. The discrepancy got me Googling, and I found that both plants contain compounds used to improve memory: galantamine, in snowdrops, is used to treat Alzheimer’s disease, and lily of the valley, according to Wikipedia, contains of compounds for memory and the heart. [Edit: Both plants are also considered poisonous.] I’m glad Sashura mentioned the plants. Though I was suspicious enough to circle the word подснежники as I read, I didn’t link it to the linguistic breakdown and fragmented memories. “The Tobacco Pouch” didn’t become an instant favorite and I’m still mulling it over but it’s an interesting take on memory and, I think, the odd things that happen when we wander into literal, metaphorical, historical, and folkloric forests.

As for recommendations… Beyond the pieces I mentioned in my 2008 Victory Day post, I particularly recommend these books with World War 2-related themes:

• Liudmila Ulitskaya’s Daniel Stein (previous post)
• Vasillii Grossman’s Life and Fate (previous post)
• Irina Grekova’s Ship of Widows (previous post)
• Il’ia Boiashov’s The Tank Driver or “White Tiger” (previous post)

Books about the war on my “to read” shelf include:

• Leonid Girshovich’s «Вий,» вокальный цикл Шуберта на слова Гоголя (“Viy,” Schubert’s Songs to Gogol’s Lyrics)
• Emmanuil Kazakevich’s Звезда (The Star)

I’d love to hear recommendations for other war-related books or stories.

Representations of Reality: A Time of Women and The Yeltyshevs

How do you prefer your fictional reality? I’ve been thinking about writers’ methods for creating fictional realities after reading two 2009 Booker Prize finalists: Elena Chizhova’s Время женщин (A Time of Women), about women in a communal apartment in the early ‘60s raising a girl who doesn’t speak, and Roman Senchin’s Елтышевы (The Yeltyshevs), about a failing family that moves from city to village in the 21^st century.

Chizhova, who won the Booker for A Time of Women, uses chunks of first-person narration that jump from character to character, capturing verbal tics and grammar mistakes. Her characters’ dialogue, inner thoughts, and descriptions sometimes feel like a mush up of skaz technique and the “verbatim” method of using actual utterances in literary and cinematic texts. Chizhova was quoted in a New York Times article as saying she eavesdropped on her mother and great-grandmother as a child, making me wonder if their speech patterns inspired her use of the vernacular in A Time of Women.

Chizhova’s situations and characters – three old women with old-fashioned names, a young female factory worker dying of cancer, and the young woman’s co-workers – feel authentic, gritty, and very specific, though the novel’s language and structure is also so choppy and jumpy that it was difficult to engage with the book. At least I’m not alone: Anna Narinskaia’s review in Kommersant (here) mentions the relief of passages in which the young woman’s daughter tells of her life in more direct language. The reviewer also mentions the frequency of diminutive forms in the book. Yes, they become grating.

What frustrated me more about A Time of Women was that I felt I’d already covered so many of its themes with other writers: voices, the apartment question, the young woman’s hassles at work over her personal life and choices, the parallel of a rotten system and cancer, illegitimate children, memories of World War Two… I don’t mean to sound immune to the power of those important and very sad themes that examine totalitarianism and the Soviet past but they had an unfortunate recycled feel, despite the way Chizhova expresses them. It’s just not my book.

To be fair, I should add that I read A Time of Women from a printout I made from the literary journal Zvezda’s Web site; I don’t particularly like reading printouts. A Russian-language book (print run: 4,000) is evidently on the way but I have seen no mentions of an English-language translation.

Which brings me to Senchin. And television, the ultimate medium for pseudo-reality. (Disclosure: I don’t have a TV.) Both Chizhova and Senchin use televisions in their books: Chizhova’s young mother manages to buy one, and it becomes a view into other lives that look happy to the characters. In Senchin, TV reflects the Yeltyshevs’ degradation. Living in the village, the family’s humanness and their television, a connection to the rest of the world, die. The family sinks into alcoholism and violence, and the TV reception fades. When they lived in town, Mr. Yeltyshev was a cop, his wife was a librarian. He fails to keep the peace, and she doesn’t seem to read much. One son can’t hold down a job, the other is in jail. Ouch.

The reader knows from the start that Senchin’s characters are doomed: Mr. Yeltyshev loses his job at the drunk tank after a critical lapse of judgment, lending the book the feel of a dark, dark parable. Senchin’s matter-of-fact narrative voice drew me in from the first sentence, and his characters, locations, and situations are so vivid that I felt like I was on location with the narrator. Senchin doesn’t include extra details, and his mentions of changes of season reinforce the atmosphere and inevitability of the Yeltyshevs’ worsening situation. Yeltyshev himself, formerly part of the rotten system, becomes rottener. I felt queasy but I couldn’t stop reading. The Russian friend who bought the book for me in Moscow read it before handing it off: she couldn’t put it down, either.

Some critics grumbled when Senchin didn’t win the Booker – I also think it or Leonid Yuzefovich’s Cranes and Dwarfs (previous post) would have been a better choice than A Time for Women – but The Yeltyshevs has been criticized by some readers who think it’s too depressing. Yes, it’s chernukha, that dark naturalism I mentioned a few posts ago. Yes, it’s horribly depressing, particularly because the Yeltyshevs are always waiting for someone, something, anything miraculous to save them from themselves and their poor decisions. The Yeltyshevs is one of the saddest, darkest, and most achingly real books I’ve read in a long time. But for my taste, it’s also one of the best because it provides such a terrifying and detailed psychological portrait of intertwined economic, social, professional, and moral failures that could, with a few changes, easily take place in another family or another country. There’s lots more I’d love to write about both these books, but I’ll stop by saying that the universality of The Yeltyshevs is, for me, an important part of what realistic fiction should be.

Level for non-native readers of Russian: A Time of Women: 4/5, rather difficult, for its vernacular plus a twitchy narrative that can be difficult to follow. The Yeltyshevs: 2/5, moderately easy thanks to simple vocabulary and a smooth writing style that builds suspense despite an obvious outcome.

Irina Grekova’s Widows and Orphans

Вдовий пароход (The Ship of Widows), Irina Grekova’s short 1979 novel about widows living in a communal apartment during and after World War 2, is far more enjoyable than it probably sounds. Grekova somehow manages to balance the nastiness and small kindnesses of everyday life and avoid excessive sweetness or bitterness. For this optimist, the result is a strangely satisfying book that emphasizes what I think I’ll call equivocal redemption and the ups and downs of interdependence. (I won’t include too much detail, in case you want to read the book.)

Grekova begins the novel with first-person narration from Olga, whose husband was killed at the front. Olga’s mother and daughter die during World War 2 bombing in Moscow. Olga is severely injured but recovers enough to walk with a cane and use her musical education working at an orphanage. She receives new housing in the communal apartment, nicknamed the ship for widows, and develops her closest relationship with Anfisa. Anfisa gives birth to a son, Vadim, whom she conceives outside her marriage while serving as a nurse during the war.

Grekova supplements Olga’s first-person narration with third-person accounts of happenings in the apartment, giving the book both immediacy and background details without a soap opera feel… even as Vadim grows increasingly recalcitrant. Vadim is a superfluous boy for the communal apartment era: he is likened to Byron, loves to call things lies, and lazes around and smokes when he’s unhappy. He’s a dark cloud with a superiority complex, and he gets lousy grades.

Anfisa raises Vadim mostly as a single mother: though her husband returns and treats Vadim well, the husband is not around for long. Still, Vadim’s upbringing is almost as communal as the apartment: the widows help at times, and Anfisa takes Vadim to work, switching from the orphanage to kindergarten as he grows. Grekova’s treatment of these aspects of World War 2 demography and reality – the shortage of men, the influx of orphans, the lack of childcare – feels more like statement of fact than complaining, despite the very clear and painful picture of hardships.

I’ve seen Grekova categorized as an urban writer. The Ship of Widows has a Moscow feel, but it was the psychology of the characters and communal living that drew me in. Yes, it’s absolutely obvious that conflicts arise because opposing sides all believe they are right, but somehow that idea felt fresh in Olga’s telling: she knows she’s as guilty as her apartment mates. There is also a discussion of grief, in which Anfisa describes Olga’s grief as “благородное, без стыда” (“noble, without shame”).

Though Grekova seems to have chosen her characters to represent various segments of society – one widow is religious, another is a former singer, and so on – she first creates and treats them as people rather than symbols, ensuring their dialogue and situations feel real rather than overly symbolic or relentlessly dreary.

The Ship of Widows is available in Cathy Porter’s English translation, from Northwestern University Press.

The Ship of Widows on Amazon

A Tank Driver with an Idée Fixe

Il’ia Boiashov’s Танкист, или «Белый тигр» (The Tank Driver or “White Tiger”) is a curious hybrid of a book that blends World War 2 history, mostly about tank warfare, with fantastical fiction focusing on a tank driver who nearly burns to death. If that doesn’t sound appealing, please consider this: the book was a finalist for several Russian literary awards, including the Booker and the National Bestseller awards. Boiashov’s language, humor, and historical endnotes work together to make the book both entertaining and illuminating.

The Tank Driver’s main character is Ivan Ivanovich Naidenov, a tank driver whose T-34 tank is killed in the 1943 Prokhorovka tank battle near Kursk. Ivan Ivanovich miraculously survives, disfigured by burns and an erased memory. His last name is based on the verb найти, to find. Ivan Ivanovich returns to tank driving, occasionally muttering “Белый тигр” (“White Tiger”), the name of a ghostlike tank he tries to track down.

The book contains plenty of background on war and tanks – Boiashov has a personal interest in tanks – so readers learn features of Soviet T-34s, German Tigers, and Canadian Valentines, among others. The book notes that there was no White Tiger tank model, making Ivan Ivanovich’s idée fixe resemble Captain Ahab’s, though German troops did paint tanks white in the winter.

Ivan Ivanovich, whose nicknames include Череп (Skull) and Van’ka Smert’ (Van’ka Death), is all about tanks: he’s a flawless, fearless, and decorated tank driver who runs on instinct, hears tanks speak, and believes the Great Tank Driver in the Sky can’t exist without a personal T-34. Ivan Ivanovich lacks worldly possessions, including a decent coat, so another character compares him to Akakii Akakeivich, the main character of Nikolai Gogol’s “Шинель” (“The Overcoat”). (previous post)

The other members of Naidenov’s crew have their own troubles: one is a serial womanizer who also plunders gold and other valuables, storing them in the tank; the second is a heavy drinker. Although Boiashhov said in an interview that he intended The Tank Driver to be a story of good and evil, he also notes that people and nations involved in war have a tendency to misbehave.

What’s most interesting for me about The Tank Driver is that Boiashov’s combination of allegory and fact results in a book the feels both suffused with history, thanks to its accurate information, yet removed from the everyday because of its main character’s almost schematically tragic incompleteness. Still, it was Ivan Ivanovich that held my interest whenever he drove onto the page: as a resurrected amnesiac with an obsession, Vank’a Smert’ is both sketchy and vivid, a fascinatingly touching and mythical figure.

The Tank Driver is a strange and wonderful short book. Though I admit my interest occasionally lagged in some of the longer historical and tank-oriented passages, I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about tanks and even took out two of our books on World War 2 tank warfare to look at photos. I suppose I have a history of that, though: I was a very willing visitor to the Patton Museum outside Louisville two years ago, where I saw many tanks, including a King Tiger, one of the models mentioned in The Tank Driver.

I think part of Ivan Ivanovich’s appeal is that, in his seemingly impenetrable tank skin, he sums up so much about the fragility of the human condition, representing all of us. Boiashov certainly deserved his many nominations: it takes an impressive combination of historical knowledge and literary skill to write a book that conveys so much and makes the fantastic feel so real.

Tank photos via Wikipedia: Top is Russian T-34 destroyed at Prokhorovka; photo from Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), author Koch. Second photo is of the sectioned King Tiger tank that I saw at the Patton Museum.

Gelasimov’s “Steppe Gods”

Andrei Gelasimov’s Степные боги (Steppe Gods) is a short and disappointing coming-of-age novel set in the steppe beyond Lake Baikal in 1945, shortly before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The novel gets off to a decent start. A boy named Pet’ka, who likes to play war, rescues a baby wolf that he names Испуг (Fear). He hides the cub near his grandmother’s goat herd.

Pet’ka lives near a camp housing Japanese prisoners of war captured at Khalkhin Gol. Among the prisoners is an herbalist of samurai stock who keeps a diary for his sons in Nagasaki. Pet’ka likes to visit the camp, where officers ease his loneliness with talk and his hunger with kasha and canned meat. Pet’ka is often teased because he is illegitimate, and he seems to be at war with many of the boys in his village. They even try to hang him at one point.

Gelasimov’s handling of Pet’ka’s family status was my first indication that Steppe Gods wouldn’t fulfill its potential. Did Gelasimov really need to repeat so much swearing [edit: words with vulgar roots]? The vulgar бля- (blia-) root, basically “whore,” for example, appears nearly 30 times, often in a “son of a” variant used to describe Pet’ka. I know all these words and they certainly don’t make me flinch – I used to hear the simplest of them used like punctuation all the time in Moscow – but I think they lose their effect because Gelasimov puts them in characters’ mouths far too often. I’m not sure if he wants the reader to remember Pet’ka’s origins, stress the low level of culture in the village, or both. Either way, I got the point. One of Pet’ka’s nastiest accusers is a woman who sleeps with officers while her husband is at war. Pet’ka gets revenge by spattering her with kasha.

I’m not sure why, but all these difficult conditions at the end of the war – hunger, infidelity, loneliness, physical and emotional abuse – don’t quite mesh with the parts of Gelasimov’s narrative that reflect Pet’ka’s thoughts. They sound convincing [disclosure: I lack a Y chromosome] and almost nostalgically childlike despite the suffering. I read Steppe Gods to the end because I wondered where the uneasy tension of childhood and abuse were going. Imagine my surprise when the last pages brought a Hollywoodesque, feel-good, new-agey ending that found multicultural common ground between the politically incorrect Pet’ka and the very kind Japanese prisoner!

The ending drew together larks, wolves, and rituals that conjure up the gods of the title, desperately resurrecting occasional motifs that hadn’t exactly dominated the previous 130 pages. The baby wolf, for example, had dropped out of the book for dozens of pages. A one-page epilogue described subsequent events that extended until 1963. [Note to writers of all nationalities: epilogues that tie up all loose plot ends are usually superfluous.]

I’ve enjoyed some of Gelasimov’s other fiction – “Жанна” (“Joan”) and Год обмана (The Year of the Lie) are very decent contemporary literary fiction – so I was surprised to dislike Steppe Gods so much. At least I’m not alone: plenty of readers on the Runet seem to have found Steppe Gods equally unsatisfying. I can’t help but agree with critic Lev Pirogov, who writes that the book reads as if it were written for the movies. Pirogov and another reader also allude to the book’s violence, and bad behavior, which they think meet the demands of readers seeking grit that feels realistic. For me, the problem with Steppe Gods isn’t the inclusion of all these unpleasant details. It’s the absence of a deeper feel for what they all mean.

P.S. Oops, I forgot to mention that Steppe Gods was shortlisted for the National Bestseller award. (previous post)

The Weight of “Heavy Sand”

Anatolii Rybakov’s Тяжёлый песок (Heavy Sand) is a Russian novel that reads almost like a triptych of novellas. The first third of the book is a pre-revolutionary love story about a Swiss man and a Ukrainian woman. The second segment shows how they raise a large family in a small Soviet-era city. The final portion details how World War 2 destroyed the family and most of the rest of the city’s Jewish population.

Characters and the consistent, homey narrative voice of Boris, one of the couple’s sons, link the three pieces of Heavy Sand. Boris tells their life stories, often interrupting himself to step forward or backward in time. He even occasionally addresses his readers, asking, for example, if we’ve remembered certain characters, are familiar with Jewish traditions, or know historical details about World War 2. Though the voice sometimes feels a little more folksy than I prefer, I was grateful that at least one writer has found a graceful way to gently remind me who is who!

Heavy Sand left me with a mixed impression. The cross-cultural love story felt fairly conventional, partly because the couple, headstrong Rakhil’ and steady Yakov, felt a little stereotypical. In the middle section, some characters appear and feel important, only to disappear after what turn out to be life-like cameo appearances. This piece of the book provides a “lite” version of Stalinist repression that enabled Heavy Sand to be published in a journal during the 1970s: prison camps are not mentioned and the justice system works. Heavy Sand’s picture of the Stalin era contrasts sharply with Rybakov’s later Дети Арбата (Children of the Arbat) trilogy, which even includes Stalin as a character.

Warnings of the war first sneak into Heavy Sand in the person of a Polish refugee who comes to Russia and works with Boris. Rybakov, through Boris, who survives the war through military service, is at his narrative best when he describes how most of the family dies under German occupation. Boris’s voice combines pride and anger, factualness and emotion, creating scenes of unforgettable cruelty. 

As I read the last chapters, I realized the power of the ordinariness of Rybakov’s characters: Boris shows us the remarkableness of good people, some children, some elderly. Though many of the characters seemed rather flat for most of the book, the vividness of their final decisions and actions and, ultimately, their deaths, made them feel very real.

With so much death and brutality, the last third of the book is quick-paced and very emotional. Boris often repeats “вечная память” (“eternal memory”) after eulogizing his family members and neighbors, giving the book’s final pages the feel of a prayer. This Novelguide page mentions several of the religious motifs from Heavy Sand. It also notes the final page, on which, after the war, a partisan asks Boris if the Russian and Hebrew lines on a memorial stone read the same. They do not, though Boris says they do, highlighting differing versions of official history. 

For further reading: 

"Soviet Jews in War: A Searing Account" -- New York Times PDF article (subscribers or paid download), December 26, 1978

Anatoly Rybakov on Amazon

Russian Victory Day: Books & A Movie & A Song

If I knew a traveler going to Russia who could visit only one landmark, I would recommend Piskarevskoe Cemetery in Saint Petersburg. With mass graves holding the remains of around a half million people, the cemetery conveys a sense of the immensity of Soviet losses during World War 2.

Despite multiple visits to Piskarevskoe Cemetery and numerous other war monuments throughout the former Soviet Union, plus a lot of reading, I know I’ll never fathom the scale of human suffering during World War 2. I don’t think that’s possible.

May 9 is Victory Day in Russia, a celebration of Germany’s capitulation that ended World War 2, so I thought I’d list some of the books (and a movie) that have helped me grasp certain aspects of how World War 2 affected people. I could mention many more, but these are the works that left the strongest impressions.

A favorite story. Andrei Platonov’s short story “Возвращение” (“The Return”) is an eloquent account of one captain’s homecoming after the war. What struck me most about the story is Platonov’s use of ostranenenie, defamiliarization, to show how Ivanov views his family and home after being away. Everything has changed. The story, written in simple language, feels detached yet personal as it contrasts ego and heart, family and military. The end is very emotional. This essay from Katherine Shonk has more analysis.

A favorite short novel. Vera Panova’s Спутники (The Train in English) takes place during World War 2 but it isn’t quite a war novel: there are no battles and very little blood, though it takes place on a hospital train. I’m not exactly sure why I liked the book so much, but its slice-of-life episodes showing people that fate threw together tells a lot about Soviet life, without much propaganda.

Other fiction. Vasilii Aksenov’s trilogy that begins with Generations of Winter (known in Russian as Московская сага) includes many passages about the war that involve historical figures and events… Although only an excerpt of Georgii Vladimov’s dense and controversial Booker Prize-winning novel Генерал и его армия (A General and His Army) is available, online, it’s worth reading, particularly because the page includes historical background... Another post-Soviet novel involving the war is Liudmila Ulitskaya’s Даниэль Штайн, переводчик (Daniel Stein, Translator). (Previous post)

Soviet-era novels about the war available in translation include Il’ia Ehrenburg’s Буря (The Storm) and Alexander Fadeyev’s rather propagandistic Молодая гвардия (The Young Guard), which I couldn’t finish. Vasilii Grossman’s classic Жизнь и судьба (Life and Fate) is on my Russian Reading Challenge list for this year.

(Someone Else’s) Favorite nonfiction. I’m not a big nonfiction reader, but my husband, who’s read many, many World War 2 books, highly recommends Peter Duffy’s The Bielski Brothers, about partisans in Belarus. Though the book is not all about World War 2, he also enjoyed In the Lion’s Den, Nechama Tec’s biography of Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew who worked for the Nazis so he could save people. (Brief posts on In the Lion's Den and The Bielski Brothers).

I’m reading Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945, which was widely reviewed in 2006. (New York Times Review One. New York Times Review Two.) It’s packed with information and based on interviews with 200 veterans, but, 75 pages in, I feel only Merridale’s voice, not the soldiers’. I’m hoping that changes because I like Merridale’s attempt to get away from Soviet mythology of the war, a topic I’ve read a lot about.

A favorite movie. Grigorii Chukhrai’s “Баллада о солдате” (“Ballad of a Soldier”) tells the story of a soldier given a 10-day home leave. This deceptively simple black and white movie is a beautiful depiction of some of the ways that war disrupts lives away from the front.

A poem. Konstantin Simonov’s “Жди меня и я вернусь” (“Wait for Me, and I’ll Return”) was one of the most popular poems of World War 2. It inspired a movie.

The “Victory Day” song. This post wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the song “День победы” (“Victory Day”). Read its history and lyrics, and download the song here on Wikipedia.