Anya Ulinich's "Petropolis": Sasha Goldberg Hits the Road

If you’re looking for summer reading that’s fun and meaningful, and includes Russian and American settings, I nominate Anya Ulinich’s beautifully written debut novel, Petropolis.

Petropolis describes the young life of Sasha Goldberg who is, sort of, black, Jewish, and Siberian. She hails from the unprepossessing Russian town of Asbestos 2, where she enjoys art school and the company of a (slightly) older guy who lives in a giant pipe. Sasha’s mother is overbearing; Sasha’s father disappears. Ulinich’s descriptions of Asbestos 2 brought me back to the late Soviet era through details like propaganda slogans on buildings and song lyrics.

Ulinich moves Petropolis far beyond the borders of Asbestos 2, to points American, when Sasha looks for a new life that will take her away from a pile of old problems. Petropolis includes elements of road and coming-of-age novels: Ulinich’s writing is strongest in the first and last legs of the Petropolis journey, but the middle also presents memorable characters and situations.

What’s most wonderful about Petropolis is that Ulinich somehow manages to create characters that are touching and quirky but not typecast and cloying. Best of all, I’m a sucker for unpredictable and unsappy happy endings, so I loved how she wrapped things up.

The title of the book references a poem (in old Russian orthography, in English) by Osip Mandel’shtam. Many thanks to Kevin Kinsella, a translator of Mandel’shtam, whose multiple mentions of Petropolis in his blog, Languor Management, kicked me into finally taking the book off the library shelf. You may enjoy his interview of Ulinich: it includes historical and personal insights into Petropolis.

Canned Peas & Nostalgia

Are canned peas the madeleines of people who lived in or visited Eastern Europe before and right after the collapse of the iron curtain?

I think of myself as not liking peas much at all unless I eat them right out of the pod, but I probably ate every canned pea garnish on my plates when I lived in Russia. Canned peas were vegetable filler, mushy and flavorless, so far removed from the essence of “pea” that they couldn’t offend me like cooked fresh or frozen peas.

And they were omnipresent, so it’s no wonder Hungarian Globus peas, a classic East bloc import, were linked with nostalgia in “Good bye Lenin!” I’m partial to Russian salad Olivier, also known as столичный салат (capital salad), a classic based on diced potatoes and meat that must include canned peas. Mayonnaise holds everything together. Sometimes the salad is mounded on a small plate and garnished with a spoonful of diluted mayonnaise that one of my students likened to snow decorating an Alp.

According to today’s New York Times, Russian émigré writer Lara Vapnyar and I have salad Olivier in common: “There are high versions and low versions,” Ms. Vapnyar said. “I like them all.”

I admire Vapnyar’s willingness to admit her affection for canned peas – the Times article even begins with the words “canned peas.” I’ve also read and enjoyed several of her stories in The New Yorker, particularly “Luda and Milena.” The story features food and appears in Vapnyar’s new collection, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love.

The Times article also mentions Darra Goldstein, whose cookbook A la Russe has, literally, served me well for two decades. The book falls open to a recipe for cabbage soup (щи) that I have made dozens of times, though always without leeks. The apple cake with chocolate glaze is perfect with tea. Unfortunately, though, the recipe for the ubiquitous Olivier salad doesn’t resemble any Olivier I’ve ever seen. I ate the stuff all over Russia but never ever came across a version that contained orange.

In case you’re curious, my favorite Russian meal is chicken cutlets (an adaptation of the Pozharskie cutlets in the Please to the Table cookbook) with fried potatoes and a cucumber-tomato salad with dill. These are foods that taste best when made fresh at home, even if I don’t have a Globus pea garnish. Or a flower carved from a carrot.

Some among you may think I torture my palate with these foods. Even if I love them, taste isn’t always the point. I rarely indulge in bare nostalgia, but Russian food brings me back to the ‘80s, when I was just beginning to learn the language, and the ‘90s, when I could hold real conversations, often over meals, speaking only Russian. Cutlets and fried potatoes conjure up the discoveries I made about Russian, myself, and the world during those years, and they remind me there is always more to learn.

P.S. On another food note: the June 9 & 16, 2008, issue of The New Yorker includes a translation of “Natasha,” a story by Vladimir Nabokov. I haven’t read it yet, but I know there’s a character named Khrenov. Хрен (khren) means horseradish in Russian, and it is also a euphemism for penis, sort of like “dick.” It can, in various forms, refer to lack of worth, and, when combined with old, it means roughly “old goat.”

A Big List for "Big Book"

The site for the Russian “Big Book” awards posted news today on nominations for the 2008 season:

-371 works, totaling over 5,000 pages, were nominated

-30 percent of the nominees are from the Moscow area; 41 Russian regions and 11 other countries are also represented

-25 percent of the nominations are in manuscript form

The Big Book site includes this teaser (in my translation): “The organizers promise that the prize could present considerable surprises this season since the works of many well-known authors were nominated in manuscript form.”

The award accepts novels, story and novella collections, plus documentary prose and memoirs. The 2008 nominees include a “significant” number of “documentary-biographical” works.

Big Book’s list of 2008 nominees includes a few writers known to readers in translation:

Vladimir Voinovich, author of the “Private Chonkin” books

Vladimir Makanin, author of Escape Hatch and The Long Road Ahead

Liudmila Petrushevskaya, author of The Time: Night and Immortal Love

Others notable nominees include:

Zakhar Prilepin, known for both his writing – he’s been shortlisted for the Russian Booker – and his membership in Edward Limonov’s Nationalist Bolshevik party. (For more on Limonov’s writing and political activity, see yesterday’s “New York Times Magazine.”)

Renata Litvinova, an actress and screenwriter who seems to be everywhere, including the screen adaptation of Viktor Pelevin’s Generation P.

Viktoriia Tokareva, a novelist also known for her screenplays, including the Soviet-era Джентельмены удачи (“Gentlemen of Fortune”).

Big Book’s panel of experts will now sit down to read and read and read for a few months. A list of finalists will be announced in late May, and winners will be named in November.

All Lizok’s postings on the Big Book Awards.

Dovlatov’s Uncompromising "Compromise"

Sergei Dovlatov’s Компромисс (The Compromise) prompts recognition. Though the novel’s narrator, a heavy-drinking journalist named Sergei Dovlatov, recounts a dozen unevenly sized slices of life set in Soviet Estonia, most readers will find bits of themselves in The Compromise.

Dovlatov looks at compromise and honesty through his vignettes, each consisting of a newspaper clipping plus Dovlatov’s account of gathering information for the article. These loosely linked stories show his boss’s ridiculous demands, typical bureaucratic hassles, and the pervasive lack of logic in life. Dovlatov’s job takes him to a birth house, a dairy farm, and a cemetery, among other places. He makes frequent use of vodka and humor during his travels.

Dovlatov’s co-workers, friends, and sources drop in and out of his narratives in various levels of development but still feel lifelike: we can fill in missing details. We already know them, just as we know Dovlatov, even if we’ve never lived in Soviet Tallinn. We’re all imperfect humans with a dose of Dovlatov in us: we’ve all been forced into situations that made us feel compromised, used, and alienated.

Dovlatov is a friendly and inherently unreliable storyteller who crafts his tales with a simple, elegant style that makes his characters and situations feel universal. I think familiarity is what makes Dovlatov’s sad humor so funny. The situations and complications that he presents – as at a funeral where he becomes a pallbearer despite not knowing the deceased – are predictable.

But predictable works here. Even when I knew what would happen, I wanted to guess and then hear Dovlatov’s twists on familiar stories. And I wanted to empathize with someone I know, someone who, at his core, resembles me. I often found myself simultaneously laughing out loud and shaking my head while I read The Compromise. It felt just right.

Some aspects of The Compromise – specifics about everyday Soviet life – might feel unfamiliar to non-Russian readers, but Dovlatov provides an apt introduction to the warped rules that pervaded public and private lives. They, of course, pop up everywhere. No matter how we escape our individual problems – through vodka, beer, TV, or, yes, even fiction -- I think the layered narratives of The Compromise, which reveal paradoxical truths and metaphors about life, should appeal to readers everywhere. Maybe they will also help us to laugh a bit more at ourselves.

SUMMARY: Very highly recommended for readers who enjoy simple, well-crafted prose about everyday events that have larger significance. Aspects of Soviet humor and life that appeal to some people (like me!) may feel “depressing” to others. The Compromise is, for me, an example of what fiction should be: stories that read easily when one is tired at the end of the day but carry ideas that seep into the subconscious and attach themselves.

Note: According to my borrowed Dovlatov book, the vignettes in The Compromise were written as individual stories during 1973-1980. Most did not originally include the newspaper “preambles,” which were added later to connect the episodes. Oddly, the New York Times review of The Compromise refers to 11 stories, but my Russian edition has 12…

Ivan Bunin: A New Statue in Moscow

A new statue of poet and prose writer Ivan Bunin was installed in Moscow today, opposite the house where Bunin lived before emigrating.

I suspect that Bunin is probably the least-read Russian Nobel Prize winner (1933) among American readers: Boris Pasternak (1958), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970), and Joseph Brodsky (1987) all have greater name recognition, for quite varied reasons.

The speech presenting Bunin with his Nobel award recognized his following 19th century classical literary traditions. Bunin’s "Тёмные аллеи" ("Dark Alleys") cycle of short stories is among his best-known work, and his “Sunstroke” is considered an erotic classic. Themes from "Dark Alleys" were adapted for film in 1991, but the movie seems largely forgotten, perhaps because costume dramas based on literature were a bit atypical for the perestroika era.

I’ve always felt guilty for knowing so little about Bunin – particularly because I’ve enjoyed what I read – so maybe this is a sign to take him off the shelf!

Graham Hettlinger’s translations of Bunin have won positive reviews:

Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin The Elagin Affair: And Other Stories Sunstroke: Selected Stories