There’s more award news this week: for one thing, Oleg Pavlov won the Solzhenitsyn Prize, an annual prize that carries an award of $25,000. I’ll take the easy way out and
quote the message I received from Pavlov’s literary agency, Elkost, which says
the prize recognizes “works in which troubles of the Russian life are shown
with rare moral purity and sense of tragedy, for consecutiveness and steadiness
in search of truth.” That’s not too far from the jury’s quote that’s included
in a news item on
lenta.ru. Previous Solzhenitsyn Prize winners include Valentin Rasputin,
Aleksei Varlamov, and Viktor Astaf’ev. I’ve written about two of Pavlov’s
novels: Казенная сказка (A Barracks Tale) and Асистолия (Asystole or Flatline).
Meanwhile, the Russian
Prize (Русская премия) announced their longlist last week. The long fiction longlist
includes Yuz Aleshkovskii’s Маленький
тюремный роман (A Little Prison Novel),
which I bought a few weeks ago, and Elena Katishonovk’s Когда уходит человек (When a
Person Leaves). Maria Rybakova’s Gnedich
(a novel in verse) and Sasha Sokolov’s Триптих
(Triptych) are among the short
fiction entries. The full longlists for poetry, short prose, and long prose are
all on the Russian Prize Website. The
Russian Prize is awarded to writers who live outside Russia and write in
Russian.
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| Misha is a king penguin. |
Finally, (in more ways than one!) I read Andrei Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin, in George Bird’s translation… I’d
included the novel on my list of books for a program at my town library last
week and realized too late that I could get the original through interlibrary
loan. The book seems to have more than one Russian title; the most common being
Пикник на льду, literally Picnic
on the Ice. Picnics on the ice are a pastime of Viktor, a writer in Kiev who
composes obituaries of people still among the living: Viktor and his pet
penguin, Misha, go with a mutual friend to the Dnepr, where Misha swims under
the ice while the humans enjoy snacks.
I was glad not to know much about the book before reading so
will just say that Kurkov’s plot includes Viktor finding himself caring for a
small girl and needing to keep a low profile because of post-Soviet dangers
linked to those obituaries. Of course Viktor also frequently buys frozen fish. I
thought the book was enjoyable, fairly light reading with an apt blend of
absurdity and social commentary. And who can resist a sad, affectionate penguin,
a precocious little girl, and their lonely caregiver? I almost want to say that
Melancholic Absurdity is the novel’s main character.
Blogger Marie Cloutier, also known as Boston Bibliophile, recently
heard Kurkov speak at a bookstore event and said he discussed similarities between penguins and Soviets. To
quote Marie, “both, he said, are used to rigid civil structures and don’t know
how to operate outside of their group.” I thought Aleksei Balakin’s review of Picnic on the Ice, in a 2006 issue
of the journal Критическая масса (Critical
Mass) offered a nice analysis of the paradox of Kurkov’s work, which is
popular in Europe but relatively unknown in Russia.
Melville House, which published Death and the Penguin in the U.S. last year, has released two other
Kurkov books in Bird’s translations: Penguin
Lost (2011) and The Case of the
General’s Thumb (2012). Additional Kurkov books are available in English
translation from U.K. publishers.
Up Next: That darn
list of recent and upcoming translations. And Roman Senchin’s Информация
(The Information). We’ll see which I
finish first.
Disclaimers: The usual.
Image Credit: King penguin photo by Samuel Blanc, via Wikipedia.
