Sunday, February 25, 2018

Riding Yakovleva’s Red Horse

I often seem to enjoy detective novels most for their portrayals of fears related to violent crime. I love the formal aspect, too, particularly when writers stretch the genre: What builds suspense and keeps the pages turning? Beyond that, I like thinking about how all those factors tend to differ in books from various countries. What might they indicate about cultures and societies?

In novels like Yulia Yakovleva’s Укрощение красного коня (Taming the Red Horse; you might want to click through for a plot summary), the fears go far beyond violent crime and, for me, anyway, the suspense comes far less from trying to figure out who dunnit than in wondering how detective Vasily Zaitsev will act when forced to face moral dilemmas. Zaitsev isn’t perfect but he does pretty well, ethically speaking, particularly given the decisions facing a resident of Leningrad in the early 1930s. I’ll confess that I don’t even remember who, exactly, ended up committing the crime. I focused primarily on Yakovleva’s geographical settings in Leningrad and Starocherkassk, not to mention the treacherous temporal setting when—this is mentioned early in the novel—most crimes were being labeled with “political.”

The basic crime here is that a lauded horse (Пряник, Gingerbread, sometimes a cookie, I love them) keels over at the race track and his rider ends up dead, too. Despite a distinct lack of interest at HQ, Zaitsev insists on investigating, leading him to a cavalry riding school, a vet school, and, eventually, Starocherkassk. The horse turns out to an Orlov and varying opinions among the novel’s horsey characters—is it better to purify the breed or bring in new blood?—seem to echo social issues of the time, particularly given the “red” in the novel’s title. Even with the horse details, in my reading, Zaitsev’s detective investigation feels like just a formal skeleton for a novel about a period when society is divided—the revolution wasn’t even a full generation ago—leading Zaitsev to wonder, for example, how a horse can differ in tsarist and Soviet times, and to notice differences in how former nobles and present peasants/workers comport themselves. Yakovleva somehow works this all into the story so it feels very natural: she’s chosen her temporal setting and formed her main characters wisely.

One of Zaitsev’s challenges is an assignment to travel to Starocherkassk with a woman named Zoya, whom he first meets when she comes to his office and throws up in his wastebasket. I figured out the cause long before Zaitsev does (he’s smart about crime but not biology!) and though he initially seems to have difficulty with Zoya’s feminist views (I noted down “Zaitsev not much for women’s lib”), he softens considerably over the course of the novel, particularly after realizing why she’s thrown up and seeing how she sacrifices so they’ll both have enough to eat during their time away. Zoya, by the way, brings Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don on the trip with her.

Dekulakization is the source of many of Zaitsev’s moral dilemmas. He gives food to starving children at a station stop during his train trip with Zoya and is later asked to participate in a security operation, as part of a “communist answer” to the “kulak bandits.” When Zaitsev is asked to participate in another unsavory bit of work later in the book, he again finds a way to refuse. The era’s catastrophic combination of repression, food shortages, dekulakization, and collectivization affect Zaitsev and Zoya in other ways, too. Zaitsev even wonders if they’re being lodged with a family that’s moved into a former kulak’s house.

If all that isn’t enough, the book oozes with atmosphere, something Yakovleva’s very good at creating. There are smelly bars, Zaitsev’s crowded communal apartment (a neighbor lends him luggage), and the unbearable heat in Starocherkassk. Sweat. Fairly early in the novel, I noted “a feeling of filth” when Zaitsev pats a stray dog then goes to rinse his hand in the Moika river, the same place people urinate. Not to worry: the water smells fresh anyway. I cringed anyway. There are nice little touches about Zaitsev, too: before leaving Starocherkassk for Leningrad, he makes sure to return tiffin boxes to a cafeteria worker so she won’t get in trouble.

I enjoyed Yakovleva’s first Zaitsev novel, Tinker, Tailor (previous post), but I think Red Horse is a much better book. Tinker, Tailor has some awkward plot lines (the love story, the imprisonment) and is saved by atmosphere, Leningrad, a serial killer’s quirky method, and Zaitsev himself. Red Horse isn’t perfect—it’s a bit long in places—but it moves along at a moderate pace, going into enough depth about Zaitsev’s psychological state and all the difficulties he faces at home (why does he suddenly have lots of servants he doesn’t need?) and work (will he be a goner because he’s acting according to his conscience?). Yakovleva layers all that very well, creating a sort of hybrid book: it’s ostensibly a detective novel but, as I mentioned above, I don’t even remember who dunnit because I was far more interested in Zaitsev, his identity, and his environment. That’s what kept me turning pages. Reviewer Kira Dolinina, writing for Kommersant, seems to have read the book similarly and I hope she’s right that Yakovleva doesn’t seem to have exhausted the detective genre yet. I, too, would love to read more about Zaitsev.

Up Next: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, two English-language titles, and the Strugatsky Brothers’ Doomed City, which will be the first of their books that I’ve been able to read in its entirety in Russian. (I’m not quite done but I already know I’ll have to finish!)

Disclaimers: The usual. I first heard about Yakovleva’s books from Banke, Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency; BGS represents Yakovleva and quite a few of my authors, and I often collaborate with them.

Saturday, February 10, 2018

2018 NOS(E) Award Winners: 2 Sorokin, 1 Sal’nikov

Vladimir Sorokin was the big winner at this year’s NOS(E)Award ceremony last week, receiving both the main jury prize and the reader’s choice prize for his Manaraga (previous post). Aleksei Sal’nikov won the literary critic panel’s prize for his Петровы в гриппе и вокруг него (which I think I’ll just call The Petrovs in Various States of the Flu yet again). The literary critic panel award is new this year and, given critical reactions to The Petrovs, I wasn’t at all surprised to see Sal’nikov win. Though I haven’t finished The Petrovs, I noted in last week’s post that I’m looking forward to reading the book in a print edition; somehow it just didn’t feel right to read in electronic form.


Although I was pleased to see Manaraga win the reader’s choice prize and thought the book was a lot of fun, I was surprised to see the main jury choose it. For one thing, Sorokin won a NOSE Award in 2011 for his Метель (The Blizzard) and a repeater win is hardly an example of “новая словесность”—new literature/letters, which is what NOSE was established to recognize—in action. Manaraga may not feel as derived from other Sorokin books as, say, The Sugar Kremlin feels linked to Sorokin’s Oprichnik, but it would be impossible to think anyone but Sorokin wrote Manaraga. I liked Manaraga well enough to put it on my 2017 year-end post as a favorite: the whole “book‘n’grill” idea is ridiculously entertaining and the creepy ending is just right even if Manaraga might feel a tiny bit light. Though not quite lite.

I haven’t read much from the NOSE shortlist (previous post) but I still think Vladimir Medvedev’s Zahhak (previous post) would have been a very worthy winner of any of this season’s major awards: beyond being truly polyphonic, the novel is suspenseful, meaningful, literary, and very readable. The setting in Tajikistan during the early 1990s also gives it plenty of social and historical relevance. I don’t understand juries’ apparent dislike—or maybe just ambivalence?—toward the book, particularly given the many positive comments I’ve heard from other readers. I realize I’m biased about Zahhak after translating excerpts from the book that only reinforced how different Medvedev’s voices are. I suppose this is yet another mystery from the world of contemporary Russian literature.

Up Next: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, which I’ve already mentioned enjoying tremendously. And the horsey sequel to Yulia Yakovleva’s Tinker, Tailor, which has been just the sort of slow-action detective novel I needed for a busy time. And some English-language titles.

Disclaimers: The usual plus the excerpts from Zahhak and the fact that the Prokhorov Fund, which runs the NOSE Award, supports many of my translations.

Sunday, February 4, 2018

Translation Award News: AATSEEL & Read Russia/Anglophone

The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages announced the winner of AATSEEL’s annual translation award this weekend. The winner is Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad, edited by Polina Barskova and including works by Gennady Gor, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov, Vladimir Sterligov, and Pavel Zaltsman. The translators are Anand Dibble, Ben Felker-Quinn, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebekah Smith, Charles Swank, Jason Wagner, and Matvei Yankelevich. The book was published by Ugly Duckling Presse and includes an introduction by Barskova and an afterword by Ilya Kukulin. Written in the Dark is a bilingual edition with endnotes. I have the book and have read quite a few of the poems. Yes, I recommend it, though I’m pretty inept at writing about poetry, so will leave details to Piotr Florczyk’s review for Los Angeles Review of Books, which includes this line about Gor’s poems, “For the most part untitled, and rhyming in the original Russian but less frequently in translation, these poems are surreal indeed, and even macabre.”

In other translation award news, Written in the Dark also made the shortlist for this year’s English-only Read Russia Prize for translation. The finalists are, in the order listed on the Read Russia site:

  • Written in the Dark (please see extensive details above!)
  • Rapture, by Iliazd (Ilya Zdanevich), translated by Thomas J. Kitson; Columbia University Press.
  • The Gray House (Дом, в котором), by Mariam Petrosyan, translated by Yuri Machkasov; AmazonCrossing.
  • Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea, by Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya), translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson, and Irina Steinberg; New York Review Books/Pushkin Press.
  • Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky, translated by Bryan Karetnyk, Anastasia Tolstoy, Robert Chandler, Maria Bloshteyn, Ivan Juritz, Donald Rayfield, Boris Dralyuk, Justin Doherty, Dmitri Nabokov, Irina Steinberg, and Rose France; Penguin Classics.

Congratulations to everybody involved with all these books!

Up Next: The NOSE Award winner tomorrow. I was glad to see that Sorokin’s Manaraga, which I enjoyed, already won the reader’s choice award. Also: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, which I already mentioned enjoying very, very much. Some English-language titles. And the sequel to Yakovleva’s Tinker, Tailor, which has been just the sort of slow-action detective novel I needed for a busy time.

Disclaimers: The usual, in full force since I’ve collaborated with many of the translators and publishers on this list, not to mention Read Russia!