New Russian-to-English Translations Published in 2024

The promised Friday afternoon update: 

The final tally, as of January 3, is 32 books. (If, that is, I counted correctly!) That’s the same number we ended up with last year. And it’s a pleasant surprise. 

This year’s titles are so self-explanatory that the list doesn’t require much analysis. Perhaps what interests me most about this year’s list is something else that comes as no surprise at all: the fact that so many of the books are somehow connected with Ukraine and that so few are contemporary fiction. Once again, there are lots of classics on the list and it’s nice to see a couple of children’s books. Of these 32 titles, 19 were written by men, 12 by women, and one by a large selection of poets. 

My usual cautions remain so I’ll just copy last year’s, with a small edit:

As for disclaimers, caveats, and other details, I’m sure I missed some books, perhaps even a lot of books. As in years past, I’ve included books of all genres and ages. Please add a comment or e-mail me with changes/errors or additions; my address is on the sidebar. NB: Though I generally list only new translations (including retranslations), I do occasionally allow a few reprints and reissues. I’ll place a link to this post on the sidebar of the blog for easy future reference. I’m already taking names and titles for 2025, so please start sending them in. Finally, don’t forget the Self-Published Translation post, here: If you have a book to include, please add it in a comment on that page and I’ll be happy to approve it.

I clearly still have not started posting regularly again, though I thought a lot in 2024 about options for doing so. Nothing, however, felt quite right, though who knows when I might read a book that tells me I need to return to regular blogging... Whether I do or not, I want to thank all of you (yet again) for reading my Lizok posts. I also want to repeat something I wrote on New Year’s Eve in 2023: Meetings with many of you, be they in person, in Zoom meetings, or over email, are part of the pleasure of being a translator.  

Thank you for that. Again, here’s wishing you lots of good reading in 2025!

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And so, another year, another list of translations! I’m doing something a bit different this year: I’m posting the entries that I have today – and wishing you a happy (still-not-quite-here-in-my-time-zone) 2025 – but I’ll finish the list by Friday. This 2024^th year has been full of surprises right up until the very end so checking the rest of the publishers on my list has been the last thing on my mind! It’s hard to say how much I’ll find given that there are already nearly 30 titles on the list and last year’s total was 33.

If you’re a translator, writer, publisher, or other interested party who has a book to add to the list, please either email me (see sidebar for address) or add a comment and I’ll be sure to include the book.

And so (take two!), I’m off for now, to eat, read, and sit by the fire. I’ll add more entries as well as a bit of analysis (though I think the trends are pretty clear this year) and my “usual cautions” for the list within the next few days!

Here’s wishing everyone good health, good reading, and a more peaceful world in 2025.

Here’s the list of translations for 2024:

Aylisli, Akram: People & Trees: A Trilogy, translated by Katherine E. Young; Plamen Press.

Buzina, Varvara: Far & Away: Tales from Rural Russia, translated by Liv Bliss; Russian Life. With illustrations by Asya Lisina.

Ehrenburg, Ilya: Babi Yar and Other Poems, translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya; Smokestack Books, March 2024.

Fadeeva, Olga: Water: Discovering the Precious Resource All Around Us, translated by Lena Traer; Eerdman’s Books for Young Readers.

Gogol, Nikolai: And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon, translated by Oliver Ready; Pushkin Press.

Gordeeva, Katerina: Take My Grief Away: Voices from the War in Ukraine, translated by Lisa C. Hayden; Penguin Random House (imprint: WH Allen).

Gorky, Maxim and Scherr, Barry P.: The Old Man and The Counterfeit Coin: Two Plays, translated by Barry P. Scherr; Slavica Publishers. Slavica lists this as Scherr’s book but two plays is enough for me to put it on the list under Gorky (this is a translation list, after all!) along with Scherr’s name.

Ivanov, Alexei: The Food Block, translated by Richard Coombes; Glagoslav.

Khlebnikov, Velimir and Apollinaire, Guillaume: Birds, Beasts and a World Made New, translated by Robert Chandler; Pushkin Press.

Kurkov, Andrey: The Silver Bone, translated by Boris Dralyuk; MacLehose Press.

Luboshinsky, Vera: The Indian Diary of Vera Luboshinsky (1938-1945), edited and translated by Dušan Deák and Rowenna Baldwin; Oxford University Press.

Navalny, Alexei: Patriot, translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Daiziel; Penguin Random House (imprint: Bodley Head).

Panaeva, Avdotya: The Talnikov Family, translated by Fiona Bell; Columbia University Press. I have a copy of The Talnikov Family and need to get on it, particularly since Fiona Bell’s translation looks very good.

Panyushkin, Valery: Displaced: Civilians in the Russia-Ukraine War, translated by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner; Europa Editions.

Pereverzin, Vladimir: The Prisoner: Behind Bars in Putin’s Russia, translated by Anna Gunin; Gemini Books/Ad Lib Publishers.

Podoroga, Valery: Mimesis: The Literature of the Soviet Avant-Garde, translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov; Verso.

Pushkin, Alexander: The Queen of Spades, translated by Anthony Briggs; Pushkin Press.

Rafeyenko, Volodymyr: The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad, translated by Sibelan Forrester; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. (Rafeyenko now writes in Ukrainian.)

Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail: Foolsburg: The History of a Town, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; Vintage (Penguin Random-House). (This is the novel known as simply История одного города, literally The History of a Town, in Russian.)

Samarqandi, Shahzoda: Mothersland, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega; Three String Books/Slavica Publishers. Mothersland was written in Tajik and Shelley translated the book from Yultan Sadykova’s “lyrical Russian” (as the book’s “about the translators” section calls it) translation of the book, titled Земля матерей. (This is another book that I have and need to finally read!)

Shaloshvili, Natalia: Miss Leoparda, translated by Lena Traer; Enchanted Lion Books. 

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4, translated by Marian Schwartz; University of Notre Dame Press.

Sorokin, Vladimir: Blue Lard, translated by Max Lawton; New York Review Books.

Sorokin, Vladimir: Red Pyramid: Selected Stories, translated by Max Lawton, New York Review Books.

Stiazhkina, Olena: Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary, translated by Anne O. Fisher; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Stiazhkina, Olena: Cecil the Lion Had to Die, translated by Dominique Hoffman; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. (This book apparently begins in Russian and ends in Ukrainian.) Bonus: Here’s an interview with Olena Stiazhkina, thanks to PEN America.

Tsvetaeva, Marina: Three by Tsvetaeva, translated by Andrew Davis; New York Review Books. 

Tsvetaeva, Marina: The Scale By Which You Measure Me: Poems 1913-1917, translated by Christopher Whyte; Shearsman Books. 

Teffi: And Time Was No More, translated by Robert Chander; Pushkin Press.

Various: Dislocation: An Anthology of Poetic Response to Russia’s War in Ukraine, edited by Julia Nemirovskaya and Anna Krushelnitskaya; Slavica Publishers. Translators Maria Bloshteyn, Andrei Burago, Richard Coombes, Yana Kane, Dmitry Manin, and Josephine von Zitzewitz also worked on this bilingual edition. Thank you to Asymptote for publishing this piece about Dislocation. I attended an online reading earlier this year and it was painful, very moving.

Various: Lectures on Analytical Mechanics, translated by O.V. Karpushina and V.G. Serbo; Oxford University Press. We cover all genres here! The authors are G.L. Kotkin, V.G. Serbo, and A.I. Chernykh.

Zavalinsky, Igor: A Dream of Annapurna, translated by Michael and Jonathan Pursglove; Glagoslav.

 

Disclaimers and Disclosures. The usual. I know many of the translators, authors, and publishers whose work is on this list. Some of these books were provided to me by publishers, authors, literary agents.

Potpourri 1: Andrew D. Kaufman on Dostoevsky & Mariengof on Cynics

Now that tax season and a multitude of other annoyances are out of the way, it’s time to get to that book backlog I mentioned in my last post. I’m not quite sure how to start clearing it away, though I suspect words like “messily” and/or “inelegantly” might be appropriate, particularly since I finished these two books many months ago. I think I’ve written before, though, that I enjoy writing about books long after reading them because it’s always interesting to find out  to see what stays with me. And so…

Andrew D. Kaufman’s The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoevsky, a book where the subtitle is so descriptive that this post almost feels superfluous, was part of my evening reading last autumn. Odd though it may sound, Kaufman’s writing about Dostoevsky’s gambling probably made the strongest, most harrowing, impression on me. After The Gambler Wife, fictional accounts of gambling (most notably in Balzac’s Lost Illusions) that might otherwise have seemed over-the-top felt utterly believable. I even wrote “Awful!!” at the start of a section that begins a month after the newlywed Dostoevskys arrive in Baden-Baden: Fyodor Mikhailovich (FMD) gambles (Kaufman mentions his “destructive mania”), and Anna Grigoryevna (AGD) hikes as an escape, since she’s also faced with, in her (translated) words, “grizzling heat, squalling children all around us, the smithy’s unbrearable hammering.”

Though I certainly wouldn’t say I think Kaufman’s book is mistitled, of course it’s as much about FMD as AGD, offering a historical, literary, and psychological introduction to FMD’s life and work, and showing AGD’s very crucial role in supporting FMD’s life and work. AGD eventually even published his books. The once-upon-a-time beginning to their marriage came when FMD was seeking a stenographer. AGD’s work began, appropriately, with The Gambler, which is, by the way, one of my favorite Dostoevsky novel(la)s. FMD’s ongoing relevance and reputation are topics of discussion as well, with Kaufman mentioning sensitive subjects, including that “Dostoevsky was deeply influenced by Slavophile ideas.” In a later chapter Kaufman notes “contradictions of Dostoevsky’s art and thought,” including xenophobia as well as, to use Gary Saul Morson’s term, “’morally reprehensible’ anti-Semitic motifs” in FMD’s work.

Kaufman’s primary focus, however, is AGD’s many roles as FMD’s partner, and he provides lots of telling primary-source information. AGD, for example, told her sister that FMD always seemed to be “sucking me into himself,” adding that he required a wife willing to “devote herself entirely, entirely to him.” (I’ll now never stop thinking of FMD as an energy vampire…) Later in the book, Kaufman writes that “…there were others [writers] who considered Anna an enabler, a woman who failed to set boundaries for her husband and gave up her own identity in service of his needs.” Given what I read, the concept feels completely correct here even if the word “enabler” feels like presentism to me. (Thank you to Languagehat for telling me the word “presentism” exists!) Nits of that sort certainly didn’t detract much from my enjoyment of The Gambler Wife, which is a compact and very readable work of narrative nonfiction, ideal for someone like me, who is emphatically not a Dostoevsky specialist but wants to read a basic account of his life, books, and marriage. The words Kaufman uses for his title, by the way, were uttered by FMD after what Kaufman calls AGD’s “flirtation with roulette” in Baden-Baden.

On a completely different note, Anatoly Mariengof’s Циники (Cynics) is one the most stylistically and thematically interesting books I’ve read in the last couple years. It’s also not an easy book to write about or even describe. Set in 1918-1924 Moscow, during the Civil War and the New Economic Policy, it’s very much a book of its time, with references to hunger, cannibalism, war, sleazy NEPmen, hunger again, war again, and cocaine use. Thinking more generally, it’s also both a novel of a fractured country and culture, and a novel about romantic entanglements with geometry larger than triangles. It’s a book about very physiological things, too: I had not been expecting early enema references (in one case, connected with love) that felt both very mundane in terms of content but, well, rather unusual for literature.

Languagehat and I corresponded about Cynics, too, so I sought out his blog post, which sums up my favorite aspect of the novel beautifully:

The genius of the book is that all this is laid out not in sweeping Tolstoyan exposition or anguished Dostoevskian self-revelation but in short bursts of dialogue or event, interspersed with even briefer accounts of what’s going on in the country at large, usually snippets from newspapers about battles, decrees, or starvation.

One of my favorite examples of this – I began thinking of those snippets as “the crawl” – comes in 1922, where section 33 (the crawl) mentions the arrest of two cannibalistic women and their victims, and then section 34 (the main story) returns to our characters in a luxe setting with music, tuxedoes, blini (food!)… Mariengof’s juxtapositions are wonderfully evocative and jarring, perfect for the time.

Cynics is one of those wondrous books (most of which, come to think of it, seem to be “about everything”) that I seem to soak up rather simply reading, making my reading more emotional than analytical. I’ll end on that note, with a link to Languagheat’s post about Cynics, which includes a plot summary far better than I could have come up with.

Disclaimers & Disclosures: The usual. I received a copy of The Gambler Wife from Riverhead Books, thank you very much!

Up Next: More backlog.

Is Truth Better Than Fiction? 2022’s Big Book Winners

As I sit down to finally write this post, four five days late, truth really does feel stranger than fiction: all three jury prizes for this year’s Big Book Award went to works of nonfiction. Pavel Basinsky won the top prize for his Подлинная история Анны Карениной (The True Story of Anna Karenina). This is Basinsky’s second Big Book win; the first was back in 2010, for Лев Толстой: Бегство из рая (Leo Tolstoy: Flight From Paradise, in Glagoslav’s translation by Huw Davies and Scott Moss).

This year’s second jury prize went to Alexei Varlamov for Имя Розанова (The Name of Rozanov), a biography of Vasily Rozanov. Sergei Belyakov took third prize for Парижские мальчики в сталинской Москве (Parisian Boys in Stalinist Moscow), about Parisian men (including Marina Tsvetaeva’s son, Georgy Efron) and their life and times in Stalinist Moscow.

Readers’ choice voters were more generous to fiction. Guzel Yakhina’s Эшелон на Самарканд (Train to Samarkand), set during the Civil War, won first prize. Basinsky’s True Story won second prize. And readers finished their troika with another novel: Anna Matveeva’s Каждые сто лет (Every Hundred Years).

I’ll conclude by saying that, yes, the three nonfiction awards mystify me more than a bit, even considering comments I’ve read on social media, theorizing about jurors’ voting habits during wartime. Of course my post about this year’s finalists (it’s here!) had me “scratching my head” about the shortlist back in June of this annus horribilis…

P.S. Here, from Big Book, is the rundown of jury voting. As you can see, the numbers are very, very close.

Disclaimers and disclosures: The usual. I translated Yakhina’s Zuleikha. I resigned from the Big Book Award’s Literary Academy (jury) earlier this year.

Up Next: A pile of books that I’m going to bundle into a series of posts. A list of 2022’s new translations; I’m suspecting numbers will be down considerably this year because of the war.

2019 Big Book Winners: Erofeev, Savely, and Volga Children

I was excited to see voting results yesterday morning for this year’s Big Book Award. The top winner was the troika of Oleg Lekmanov, Mikhail Sverdlov, and Ilya Simanovsky for their biography Венедикт Ерофеев: посторонний (Venedikt Erofeev: The Outsider). The Outsider is one of the most compelling books I’ve read this year and is one of two books that tied for my top marks. I’ll be writing about The Outsider very soon so for now will just leave you (yet again!) with a line from Oliver Ready’s review for The TLS about the book, “In fact, this is not one biography but two, for between each chapter comes an interlude devoted to Moskva- Petushki.”

Second place went to Grigory Sluzhitel’s Дни Савелия (Savely’s Days) (previous post), a favorite from last year that tied as my other top book. Guzel Yakhina took third place for Дети мои (Children of the Volga), a blend of history and fairy tale motifs in a novel about a Volga German man and his daughter.

Readers’ voting results were a bit different, with Yakhina winning, Sluzhitel’ coming in second, and Evgeny Vodolazkin taking third for his Брисбен (Brisbane), a novel about a virtuoso guitarist coming to terms with a serious medical condition.

I’ve already mentioned that I thought the 2019 Big Book finalists were a big improvement over the last several shortlists. Looking back at this year’s list (previous post), I’m reminded of how much I enjoyed some of the books that didn’t win any awards at all, especially Evgenia Nekrasova’s Kalechina-Malechina (previous post) and Alexei Sal’nikov’s Indirectly, but also parts or aspects of almost all the others. Not everything was to my taste, of course (fortunately!), but this was a year when I saw merit in every single book. I’m crossing my fingers that next year’s lists will be even better and particularly hope more women will make the shortlist. Guzel Yakhina, Linor Goralik, and Evgenia Nekrasova certainly did their part representing women this year with three very different works, but I’d love to see more recognition for some of the other women writing good books. This is particularly important given the Big Book’s relatively high visibility.

Edits: The voting results are detailed on the Год литературы site here.

Up Next: The Erofeev and Brik biographies, which I’ll write about together. Bulat Khanov’s Гнев (Rage or Fury or something similar…).

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. I’m a voting member of the Literary Academy, the Big Book Award’s very big jury. I’ve translated books by two of this year’s award winners and know other authors whose books were finalists.

English-Language Reading Roundup

This post has been incubating for months so I’ll get right to some quick notes on a few books I read in English in recent and not-so-recent months.

I’ll be honest: I requested a copy of Chekhov: Stories for Our Time from Restless Books because of the art, drawings by Matt McCann. Considering the book’s subtitle, I was also interested in Boris Fishman’s introduction, which does, indeed, address what I think of as the stereotypical Chekhov, plus the earthy Chekhov, with a bit of analysis of Chekhov’s writings (which Fishman confesses he didn’t always particularly love), as well as the relevance of Chekhov’s work in our current troubled times. Fishman wonders what Chekhov might have written about people living under certain political leaders. Ouch, ouch, and ouch.

Which is how I felt when I read the first clump of stories – “Stories of Love,” which included “The Darling,” “Anna on the Neck,” “About Love,” and “The Kiss,” plus “The House With the Mezzanine,” from the “Slow Fiction” section – and felt an old funny sadness and sad funniness all over again. Chekhov often makes me feel like I’m being pricked by a pin, like I’m deflating, but I somehow enjoyed that odd sensation when reading these translations by Constance Garnett, which felt just as decent for the purpose now as they did when I read them in college. (I also learned from this book that Garnett considered her mode of dress “unambitious;” perhaps this is an area where she and I truly are peers.) The book also contains a mouth-watering version of “The Siren,” specially translated for this volume by Restless Publisher Ilan Stevens and Alexander Gurvets: Stevens apparently doesn’t know Russian so Gurvets served as his “informant” and the resulting descriptions of hungry people and food, particularly lots of fish, including sterlet, carp in sour cream… In any case, this volume would make a lovely holiday gift, one I’d especially recommend for readers new to Chekhov, for the stories as well as McCann’s evocative illustrations and Fishman’s gentle, humorous guidance.

I probably would have bought Curzio Malaparte’s The Kremlin Ball, translated by Jenny McPhee for New York Review Books, for a picture, too, if I hadn’t already known I wanted to read the book: I’ve always loved the painting on the cover, Yuri Pimenov’s New Moscow. Although The Kremlin Ball was never finished (something McPhee mentions in the first sentence of her foreword) I have to wonder if Malaparte’s account of Moscow in the late 1920s feels particularly honest and scathing – even voyeuristic in his gossipy accounts of famous personages, many from the “Marxist aristocracy” – because he never smoothed it. I’m not a big nonfiction reader but The Kremlin Ball (a title that tosses me back to Bulgakov’s account of “Satan’s Ball” in Master and Margarita every time I read or type it) sure kept me interested. How could I not want to read a book where Chapter 4 begins with “One Sunday morning I went to the flea market on Smolensky Boulevard with Bulgakov”? Or where there’s an account of requesting Lunacharsky’s permission (granted) to visit the apartment where Mayakovsky had committed suicide? McPhee’s translation read very nicely (I didn’t feel the anxiety about Russian material that I sometimes sense when I read translations about Russia that weren’t made from the Russian) and the book’s ten pages of endnotes contain some helpful background information.

Finally, there’s Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M., which I finished late last winter but which still feels unusually vivid. This eight-hundred-page story of young Marina Makarova’s experiences during and after the October Revolution follows Marina through a storm of personal and public events, beginning with her comfortable upbringing and first love, and moving on to her second love and the collapse of both her country – she supports the revolution – and her relationship with her family. Fitch subjects Marina to ordeals that often correlate in some way to what’s happening around her – there’s violence that made me feel physical pain, for example, and she’s often in near-seclusion – but she also finds love and poetry. (Fitch’s acknowledgements note that translator Boris Dralyuk created “original translations for much of the Russian poetry that appears in this book.”) There’s lots more, including a snowy journey that felt cold, cold, cold and a semi-finale involving mysticism. I write “semi-finale” because I’m waiting for the sequel, which will apparently be out in July 2019.

Coming of age novels are pretty common but Fitch does a beautiful job pushing the genre’s boundaries – I meant what I said about feeling physical pain while reading – by serving up elements of high and low, poetry and the basest of behavior, vermin and astronomy, in a way that remind me of Marina Stepnova’s The Women of Lazarus, which critic Viktor Toporov so memorably called «высокое чтиво» (which I translated as “high-class pulp” when I blogged about the Stepnova book here). “High-class pulp” is probably one of my favorite categories (if that’s possible to say) of fiction because I so enjoy reading about the contrasting elements of the earthy (which often includes disturbing scenes) and the cerebral that these books so often seem to present. I should also note that The Revolution of Marina M. is very much a St. Petersburg/Petrograd novel so I particularly appreciated it after spending a short week in Petersburg last November. I’ve gone a bit light on details because I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone who’d like to read it. For more: The Los Angeles Times ran a nice piece by Fitch last November that offers detail on the book and her travel to St. Petersburg for research.

I’ve also amassed a small pile of other books – all translations – that I’ve read in part and enjoyed very much in recent years but intend to read more of now that I have them in printed book form:

• Horsemen of the Sands, by Leonid Yuzefovich, translated by Marian Schwartz, contains two novellas, Песчаные всадники (Horsemen of the Sands) and Гроза (The Storm), which I described in brief in an old post. I read a large chunk of Horsemen last year before Marian and I participated in a roundtable discussion during Russian Literature Week and am looking forward to reading the whole thing in print, in a lovely edition from Archipelago Books.
• The Land of the Stone Flowers: A Fairy Guide to the Mythical Human Being (Книга, найденная в кувшинке), by Sveta Dorosheva, translated by Jane Bugaeva, is exactly what the title says it is and chapters like “What is a Human?” and “About Human Objects and Residences” are illustrated by Dorosheva’s stylish and humorous drawings, many of which are in full color. Jane told me that Dorosheva even changed a few illustrations to fit the English translation: the book’s text (from which I translated excerpts some years ago) contains lots of idioms that can’t be rendered literally. This one’s a lot of fun and I am very happy that Jane had a chance to translate it. From Chronicle Books.
• Blue Birds and Red Horses, by Inna Kabysh, translated by Katherine E. Young, is a chapbook containing five poems. I’ve heard Katherine read many of her beautiful Kabysh translations at conferences and am glad some of them have made their way into this chapbook from Toad Press.

Disclaimers and disclosures: The usual. I received two review copies: the Chekhov book from Restless Books and the Yuzefovich book from Archipelago Press. Jane sent me a copy of The Land of the Stone Flowers and Katherine sent me a copy of Blue Birds and Red Horses. I bought the Fitch and Malaparte books at a local bookstore. Thanks to Restless and Archipelago for the review copies as well as, respectively, bonus books that look great: David Albahari’s Checkpoint, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać and Willem Frederik Hermans’s An Untouched House, translated by David Colmer. I’m wondering if the universe is telling me to resurrect my Other Bookshelf blog. I do think about that. It may happen.

Up next: Russian reading roundup, Big Book Award results and roundup, and Eduard Verkin’s Sakhalin Island, which confounds me in some ways because Verkin piles on plot line after plot line but yet the story is so absorbing and Verkin’s post-apocalyptic future is so imaginative that I can’t help but keep reading.

Anna Starobinets’s Look at Him

Perhaps the easiest thing to write about Anna Starobinets’s Посмотри на него (Look at Him) is that it blends several genres. The cover says “100% .doc” and the book is, indeed nonfiction—albeit a combination of memoir, medical history, and journalism, so not thoroughly .doc, at least to my mind—but what makes the book so compelling and human is that Starobinets puts her fiction-writing background to good use, pacing her book to develop a story arc and suspense. I could only read a little bit at a time because a personal story about late-term abortion is so intensely emotional. Even so, I had a hard time putting the book down at night.

Starobinets begins Look at Him at a routine ultrasound exam, to check her baby’s progress. She learns that her baby is a boy but she also learns he may have polycystic kidney disease. The medical side of her baby’s story is so complex, from many angles, including genetics, prenatal testing, and possible outcomes, that I won’t elaborate on that much. What’s most crucial to the book’s narrative arc is that Starobinets decides to terminate her pregnancy because doctors advise her that if she carries her son to term he will have a minimal chance of surviving.

Starobinets has been called a Russian Stephen King but learning about the realities of her child’s condition (which involves waiting and learning about various potential outcomes) and medical procedures for late-term abortion (some of which she quotes from online forums) in Look at Him mean she doesn’t need to embellish the truth to develop the afore-mentioned suspense. There’s another layer to the book, though, that creates at least as much tension: how the Russian medical system treats her much of the time. Without asking her permission, one specialist brings in medical students to observe her transvaginal ultrasound. Finding her way through the medical system is demeaning. She receives little empathy from many practitioners, though there are exceptions. And forgetting to wear foot covers can be problematic; she storms a clinic bathroom when she’s told she can’t go in without them. Her husband isn’t allowed in a clinic for her appointment, though she needs his moral support. And then there are the stories and admonitions she reads online.

Starobinets ends up going to Berlin after a friend finds a clinic for her. Many aspects of her treatment, both medical and human, are different there. Her husband is welcome at the clinic (even to spend the night) and she’s told “There is no reason why you should be in pain.” One of her biggest fears now is seeing her child. (This is where the book’s title comes from.) Starobinets and her husband are told at the clinic that parents usually look at their children after they’ve been born this way, meaning already dead; many even spend a day with them. Some of the most affecting scenes in the book describe Starobinets and her husband seeing their son after his birth, receiving an envelope with a photo and hand- and footprints, and visiting their baby’s grave later, when they return to Berlin for Starobinets’s husband, Alexander Garros, to have treatment for esophageal cancer. (Part of what made Look at Him so emotional is that I knew Garros died in 2017.) Starobinets notes that many Russian marriages break up after late-term terminations of pregnancy and she suspects that’s largely because husbands aren’t allowed into clinics, hospitals, or births. Or to look at their babies after the procedure and truly be able to share their wives’ grief. Garros helps Starobinets after their return home, too, when she has panic attacks And he’s with her when she gave birth to a healthy son in Latvia a couple of years later.

There’s lots more to Look at Him—I haven’t even touched on the role of Starobinets’s and Garros’s daughter in the family’s story—including a hundred pages of appendices covering interviews with doctors and patients plus comparative statistics on terminations of pregnancies in Germany and Russia. After reading some appendices and skimming others, I can see that they make Look at Him a sort of memoir that offers substantial background for other families faced with tough decisions based on prenatal exams and/or with similar emotions after the loss of a child with a congenital condition. More than that, it’s a book about life and death, basic human dignity, and treatment under various medical systems. (Unfortunately, dignity isn’t guaranteed anywhere, something I’ve certainly seen both from working as a medical interpreter for several years and from being a consumer of health care in the U.S., where the system gives ample opportunities to see absurd bureaucracy, burdensome pricing despite insurance, and bedside manner that can be indifferent, opinionatedly pushy, or inept at basic things like blood draws.) There’s been controversy about Look at Him, which is a finalist for the 2018 National Bestseller Award, but I commend Starobinets, as both a mother and a writer, for being able to sort through her emotions and knowledge, discuss her decisions (which not every reader will agree with), and write a book that tells so many real-life stories about what happened both during and after her pregnancy. Yes, it’s a work that’s both journalistic and personal rather than poetic or lovely, and some might see it as TMI, but Look at Me feels honest, like a genuine attempt to offer information to other families, no matter what they may ultimately decide when faced with similar situations that offer no ideal resolutions.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up next: I’m slowly wending my way through a heavy “write about” shelf: the lovely short story cycle I’ve mentioned earlier, Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M. (I’m already waiting for the sequel!), Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s City Folk and Country Folk in Nora Seligman Favorov’s translation, and Vladimir Sharov’s The Rehearsals in Oliver Ready’s translation. And more…

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.