The 2019 NatsBest Goes to Rubanov, Old News Edition

Andrei Rubanov won the 2019 National Bestseller Award for his Финист - ясный сокол (Finist, the Brave Falcon; I’ll keep borrowing the title from a Soviet film for now), a novel with motifs from folktales. Honorary jury chair Yury Voronin broke a tie between Finist and Evgenia Nekrasova’s Kalechina-Malechina, each of which had two votes. Voronin said he would have gone for Mikhail Trofimenkov’s XX век представляет. Кадры и кадавры (The 20th Century Presents. Cadres and Cadavers) if that had been an option, but Cadres and Cadavers had just one other vote. The only other book to win a point in the final round was Alexander Etoev’s Я буду всегда с тобой (I’ll Always Be With You), which I’m looking forward to reading soon, thanks to a very kind colleague.

Rubanov’s win wasn’t particularly surprising given that Finist racked up thirteen points from the award’s “big jury,” second only to Trofimenkov’s fourteen. I was pleased to see Kalechina-Malechina, which I’ll be writing about soon, come in second after finding a lot to admire in Nekrasova’s colorfully written story about a young girl.

I saw the news about the NatsBest when I was sitting at the airport waiting to fly home after spending a day in New York for Read Russia’s Russian Literature Week… I clicked through to read the beginning of Finist, which, of course, feels very different from any Rubanov I’ve read since it’s set in the distant past rather than either a dystopian future Moscow (Chlorophyllia is still my favorite Rubanov book, previous post) or a very right-here-right-now Moscow, as in The Patriot, which won the Yasnaya Polyana Award in 2017. In any case, I’m interested in giving Finist a try in print – or maybe again on the reader without the distraction of gate changes and crowds of humanity walking past.

I had a very fun time in New York, traveling for a Read Russia discussion with Olga Slavnikova, Guzel Yakhina, and Ian Dreiblatt. Olga’s The Man Who Couldn’tDie and Guzel’s Zuleikha both came out in English translation (Marian Schwartz’s and mine, respectively) this year, and Ian is a wonderful translator, poet, and reader-observer, so there was plenty of “in conversation” to go around. Other than sleeping and riding the subway (never simultaneously), I spent my other hours in New York drinking coffee, wandering Central Park, and meeting and eating with my fellow panelists, other translators, other Read Russians, and the very good people of Columbia University Press/Russian Library who will release my translation of Margarita Khemlin’s Klotsvog into the world in August. They’ve done a great job with the book and I’m very excited for it to come out.

Up Next: More award news! Big Book finalists will be announced this week. Then Nekrasova’s Kalechina-Malechina and other tales. All bets are off for what comes after that.

Disclaimers: The usual, including that I translated NatsBest secretary Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina.

Big Book Goes Big With Its 2019 Long Longlist

Last week the Big Book Award announced a longlist consisting of forty one titles. The Big Book’s shortlist – of somewhere between eight and fifteen titles – will be named on June 5. Given the sheer volume of volumes on this year’s (long)list, I’ll name about a third of those selected, including the books I’ve read, a couple overlaps with the National Bestseller shortlist, and several completely unfamiliar books that sound like they might be interesting.

The books I’ve already read:

• Eduard Verkin’s Остров Сахалин (Sakhalin Island) (previous post) still bugs me for being such an absorbing and unforgettable but rather messy postapocalyptic novel that channels Chekhov.
• Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Брисбен (Brisbane) tells the story of a virtuoso guitar player who discovers he has an incurable medical condition.
• Anna Nemzer’s Раунд (Round) (previous post) is a polyphonic novel about love, identity, history, and everything else.
• Alexei Salnikov’s Опосредованно (Indirectly perhaps? This is what a colleague and I think might fit…), which I’ll finish today, is about a woman living in the Urals who writes poetry in a world that’s almost like ours, though poems have drug-like effects.
• Grigory Sluzhitel’s Дни Савелия (Savely’s Days) (previous post) is the first-cat narrative I so enjoyed last year.
• Evgenia Nekrasova’s Калечина-Малечина (Kalechina-Malechina) is waiting for a second chance. I read half of K-M and am now feeling strong pangs that demand I return, particularly after just finishing Nekrasova’s novella Несчастливая Москва (Unhappy Moscow). I already appreciated her use of language and now I’m starting to get into her (abundantly peculiar and rather frightening) universe, too, so feeling ready for the second half of K-M. (I’m also finally going to read Platonov’s Happy Moscow. I’m so long due to read more Platonov, but even his short works are always a big itch to try to scratch.)

The two books that overlap with the National Bestseller list (previous post) are Nekrasova’s Kalechina-Malechina and Andrei Rubanov’s Финист - ясный сокол (Finist, the Brave Falcon).

A few books and authors completely unfamiliar to me, listed in alphabetical order by author:

• Olgerd Bakharevich, author of Собаки Европы (The Dogs of Europe), says this gigundo (nine-hundred-page Edit: oops, apparently it’s a mere 768 pages!) book is about everything, with Belarus, Europe, the world, and Minsk being some of that “everything.” He translated the book himself, rewriting it in the process.
• Fyodor Grot’s Ромовая баба (Rum Baba) warrants a mention for the simple fact that the beginning mentions plague.
• Anna Klepikova’s Наверно я дурак (literally something like I’m Probably a Fool) describes itself as an anthropological novel (it appears to be autofiction) and sounds like it’s about a volunteer at a home for children with (apparently) psychiatric issues. (An excerpt)

Finally, there are two manuscripts. Manuscripts always have an air of mystery (and, honestly, irritation as well) since no author’s name or publisher is mentioned. But at least these titles are simple! Number 141 is Вавилонская лестница (The Staircase of Babel) and number 158 is Рюрик (Rurik).

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. Many of the books mentioned in this post were given to me; I know some of the authors listed and have translated three books by one. I’m a member of the Big Book’s jury, known as the Literary Academy.

Up Next: A Salnikov post covering The Department and what I’ll provisionally continue to call Indirectly. And then probably Nekrasova.

The 2019 National Bestseller Award Shortlist

The NatsBest Award announced six finalists last week. I’ve listed the books below, with the first (“big”) jury’s point totals. I haven’t read any of the books in full (yet) and know little about them beyond bits I’ve read in reviews and descriptions, so more caveat emptor (as it were) than usual on my summaries (and titles, too). I also confess that I’ve looked the least into the last two books: they interest me most and, selfishly, I don’t want to know too much before reading. The winner – who is supposed to wake up famous – will be announced on May 25.

Film critic Mikhail Trofimenkov’s XX век представляет. Кадры и кадавры (The 20th Century Presents. Cadres and Cadavers is the title that sounds best, translating “кадры” as “cadres” but given the film topic, well, I suspect there’s at least a double meaning of “frames” or “shots,” plus “кадавр” apparently has an additional meaning of some sort of living dead in Russian, a topic seeming to warrant further study and reading!) is a sociopolitical/sociocultural book about film in many countries during the second half of the twentieth century. (14 points)

Andrei Rubanov’s Финист - ясный сокол (Finist, the Brave Falcon; at least for now I’ll borrow the title from a Soviet film) sounds like a blend of ancient Russia, folktale motifs, and fantasy. Here’s a version of the story of Finist. (a lucky 13 points)

I’m so unschooled about manga and anime that I didn’t recognize the “otaku” in Upyr Likhoi’s title Славянские отаку (Slavic otaku). I was curious about the author’s name, too, a pseudonym borrowed from an eleventh-century Russian scribe and priest, though simply looking at the words, the name sounds like Vampire/Ghoul + Evil/Spirited; I kind of like the “Wicked Vampire” option mentioned on Wikipedia’s Öpir page. In any case, it’s a great pseudonym with a fair bit of history. In any case (again), it sounds like the book is an allegory (satirical, too?) of the political conflict between Russia and Ukraine told through two guys who spend a lot of time online. (7 points)

The only book I’ve read any of (about half) is Evgenia Nekrasova’s Калечина-малечина (Kalechina-Malechina): this novel about a girl who is bullied and often left to her own devices struck me most for Nekrasova’s imaginative use of language and vivid settings and situations. I admired those aspects of the book enough that this one has been bothering me, asking, even begging, for another chance at finishing. (7 points)

Alexander Etoev’s Я буду всегда с тобой (I’ll Always Be With You) is set in 1943, in Russia’s Far North. (6 points)

Alexander Pelevin’s Четверо (The Four or perhaps even something like Four of Them) sounds tempting, blending elements of science fiction and detective novels, plus three very distinct temporal settings that somehow connect. (6 points)

Up Next: Alexei Salnikov’s wonderfully twisted The Department.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual, plus I translated NatsBest secretary Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina.

Belated Yet Again! Yasnaya Polyana Winners & Blog Birthday

Late again! Yasnaya Polyana Award winners were announced way back on October 12 so I’m painfully late this time around. Getting right down to things: Andrei Rubanov won the contemporary Russian prose award for his Патриот (The Patriot) and Oleg Ermakov was the reader’s choice winner for Песнь Тунгуса (The Tungus’s Song). In the foreign literature category, Mario Vargas Llosa, along with translator Kirill Korkonosenko, won for his El héroe discreto (The Discreet Hero).

I’d been rooting for Vladimir Medvedev’s Zahhak in the contemporary Russian prose category so was surprised that it was The Patriot—rather than either Zahhak or The Tungus’s Song, which I haven’t read but which I’ve read good things about—that won over the jury. As I’ve mentioned before, The Patriot and Znaev, its main character, didn’t capture me at all. That said, I realize the book, which has been shortlisted for two other major prizes, hits numerous nerves with its portrayal of contemporary Russia, a place Rubanov is very good at describing with well-chosen details.

I’ve been so caught up in deadlines, getting back into routine things like feeding cats and doing laundry after travel, and overcoming the combination of jetlag and a minor but lingering cold that I completely forgot about my blog birthday! It’s been ten years since I started writing the blog and each year I could list more and more ways this blog has changed my life. I didn’t start writing it because I wanted to become a literary translator or because I wanted to learn about the book industry but, somewhat inevitably, I suppose, the blog ended up leading me to both. The fact that I love translating Russian novels and I love learning about the book industry makes the blog all the dearer to me. As does the fact that I’ve met so many blog readers during these last ten years: many of you are now colleagues and friends, another reason the blog holds meaning for me.

This year I’ll dispense with my usual statistics—they’re ever duller anyway since so many surfers, including me, surf so anonymously these days—and just say a very, very heartfelt thanks to everyone who visits the blog, no matter how infrequently. Most of all, as I turn ten, I’m happy that what I write here seems to be useful for so many of you in such varied ways. Thank you again for your visits and for your interest in contemporary Russian fiction!

Up Next: The Booker Prize shortlist is coming right up. Trip report on the American Literary Translators Association conference and the Frankfurt Book Fair—what a ten-day whirlwind journey that was! Plus two books: Medvedev’s Zahhak and Anna Kozlova’s F20.

Disclaimers and disclosures: The usual. I’ve translated excerpts from Zahhak and have translated books by two Yasnaya Polyana judges, though have not discussed this year’s results with either of them.

Image credit: nazreth, via stock.xchng, for the cupcake.

The 2017 Yasnaya Polyana Award Shortlist

I mentioned in my last post that it’s award season… Which means that I’m back this week with yet more prize news: the Yasnaya Polyana Award’s shortlist, which was announced a week or two ago. I’ll be writing about the NOSE Award longlist soon, too.

The Yasnaya Polyana Award has six finalists; winners will be announced on October 12. For more on each book, check out Natalya Lomykina’s detailed summaries (with brief excerpts) on the rbc.ru site.

• Ksenia Dragunskaya’s Колокольников – Подколокольный ([Between] Kolokolnikov and Podkolokolnyi, I think… this title appears to refer to events taking place between these two streets). It looks like there’s lots of Moscow in this novella and I have to admit I’m a sucker for Moscow novel(la)s, particularly when the plot has something/anything to do with geography and/or toponyms. This novella sounds like it also involves how characters—and Moscow, too—change from the late-Soviet period to the present day. It looks very inviting when I scroll through. Kind of like how central Moscow invites strolling through…
• Oleg Ermakov’s Песнь тунгуса (The Tungus’s Song) (excerpt) sounds rather mysterious: Klarisa Pulson even called it “an/the original Siberian Twin Peaks” in her Big Book post on Novaya Gazeta. (Klarisa predicted it would be a Big Book finalist. I wish!) Of course the Twin Peaks fan in me (Did I ever mention that I bought a TV in Moscow specially so I could rewatch Twin Peaks, dubbed in Russian?) thinks that’s already a few points in its favor. The novel apparently involves a young man who comes to Siberia to work in forestry and an Evenk man who’s accused of arson and is the grandson of a shaman woman… 
• Vladimir Medvedev’s Заххок (part 1) (part 2) (Zahhak), which I’ve already read, is my kind of book. I love the polyphony of seven characters telling about troubled times in Tadzhikistan in the early 1990s and I love how Medvedev interweaves the events in his characters’ lives, blending recent history, archetypes (I don’t think I’m stretching the word too much), and good storytelling. It’s sad and brutal in more ways than one, and it’s an excellent book.
• Mikhail Popov’s На кресах всходних (hmm, the title is apparently taken from the Polish, so it’s something like On (the) Eastern Borders, where the “borders” are the tricky word “kresy”) seems to be set in western Belarus during 1908-1944 and to cover three generations. For future reference, there’s a lengthy article about it here on the Литературная Россия site.
• Andrei Rubanov’s Патриот (The Patriot) tells the story of former banker Sergei Znaev, who’s the present owner of a failing store. The Patriot hit the NatsBest and Big Book shortlists, too; I’ve read a large chunk. The Patriot isn’t the first time that I’ve liked the premise of a Rubanov novel more than the novel itself: Rubanov writes very decent mainstream fiction (reminder: I love good mainstream fiction) and he’s a master of incorporating contemporary detail into his novels. But this book just didn’t hit me at all. 
• German Sadulaev’s Иван Ауслендер (Ivan Auslender) sounds like it’s about a middle-aged academic who gets pulled into politics and doesn’t like it… so he heads off to travel. Sadulaev is also very good at pulling current-day material into his books, but his writing tends to be edgier than Rubanov’s.

Disclaimers: The usual. I’m working on excerpts of Zahhak.

Up next: The NOSE Award longlist. Medvedev’s Zahhak. Fall travel report. And books, hmm. I’ve been having a hard time with this year’s Big Book finalists, none of which grab me nearly as much as Zahhak did. Reading Zahhak felt like a literary palate cleanser after failed attempts at all too many Big Book candidates. Most recently, I got stuck deep in the middle Shamil Idiatullin’s Brezhnev City, which contains reams (almost literally, the book is 700 pages long) of wonderful stuff about life in the Soviet Union in 1983, the year I first visited the USSR. Sometimes, though, less is more and the magpie approach simply doesn’t work for me here. Following Elmore Leonard’s principle of not writing the parts that people skip: it feels like a great deal of Idiatullin’s material (at least 25 percent) should have or could have been cut to make the novel shapelier. I feel especially sad about that because so much of what Idiatullin writes is beautifully presented and described, particularly the complex texture of Soviet life in the 1980s and the ever-changing emotions of the main character, a teenage boy. Konstantin Milchin describes the storytelling problems at the end of his review for TASS.

Lizok’s Summer 2017 Reading Plan: Ten Big Book Award Finalists

The Big Book Award announced its shortlist last Monday, making this post yet another better-late-than-never production. (It’s deadline time again, what can I say?!) As far as commentary goes, there are a few books I was surprised and sorry missed the list, among them Vladimir Sorokin’s Manaraga (previous post), Anna Starobinets’s Посмотри на него (something like Look at Him, perhaps?), and Anna Kozlova’s F20, which just won the National Bestseller Award. As always, Klarisa Pul’son’s guess list and pre-announcement analysis (here) is informative and fun. Beyond that, for now—since I haven’t yet read any of the finalists, the Starobinets book, or the Kozlova book, or much of anything else from the longlist—I’ll just add that I’m very sorry and disappointed not to see any (any!) female authors on the list, particularly after Kozlova won the NatsBest (where 3/7 of the finalists were women, the other two being Figl’-Migl’ and Elena Dolgopyat, neither of whom made the Big Book longlist) over the weekend. 

In any case, here’s the list of ten finalists for 2017, in the (random?) order they’re listed on the Big Book site, with descriptions. Winners will be announced in early winter and I’ll be posting about my reading before then. There’s a preponderance of long books on the list: at least five are 700 pages or longer. I love a good (good!) long book so am hoping for the best. Although I don’t know much about the books on the list, I’ve already read books by six of these authors.

• Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Тайный год (The Secret/Mysterious Year). I already started this book about the strange time when Ivan the Terrible left both the throne and Moscow for a while... the novel’s cover description mentions psychodrama with an element of phantasmagoria and that seems about right. Gigolashvili’s language is, as always, colorful and playful, this time with lots of medieval touches. This is a long (700+ pages) book with small print and it takes a fair bit of concentration so my guess is I’ll be reading it for a while yet. This book already won the 2017 Russian Prize.  

• Aleksei Sal’nikov’s Петровы в гриппе и вокруг него(Severe tricky title alert! The Petrovs in Various States of the Flu might capture things; this is literally something like “The Petrovs in and around the flu” though I could be completely missing the point since I haven’t read the book.). A novel about a contemporary and allegedly unusual family (aren’t they all?) set in Yekaterinburg. Based on the online version, it’s safe to say that people do have the flu. I don’t like the flu but this one looks interesting.

• Lev Danilkin’s Ленин. Пантократор солнечных пылинок (Lenin. Pantocrator of Dust Motes, I believe, since Lenin refers to dust motes in Aristotle’s De Anima). A biography of V.I. Lenin, né Ulyanov. A heavyweight checking in at 784 pages. 

• Igor Malyshev’s Номах (Nomakh). A novel about the Civil War and Russian anarchist Nestor Makhno, a.k.a. Nomakh, whom Sergei Yesenin immortalized, too.

• Andrei Rubanov’s Патриот (The Patriot). The Patriot, about businessman Sergei Znaev, already made the 2017 NatsBest shortlist. Rubanov’s literary agency, BGS, has a full description. (Only 512 pages!)

• Aleksei Slapovsky’s Неизвестность (Uncertainty? I’m uncertain because I haven’t read the book, though this seems to fit descriptions…). A book covering 1917-2017—the cover says “роман века,” “novel of the/a century”—told through diaries, poetry, and other, well, stuff; Klarisa says “datafiction” is already a term for describing this genre… (Also 512 pages!)

• Shamil Idiatullin’s Город Брежнев (Brezhnev City, at least sort of: Naberezhnye Chelny was called “Brezhnev” during 1982-1988). Childhood in the late Soviet period… I keep reading good things about this book and am looking forward to it very much. Another 700 pages or so…

• Viktor Pelevin’s Лампа Мафусаила, или Крайняя битва чекистов с масонами (Methuselah’s Lamp, or The Last Battle of the Chekists and Masons). Could there have been a Big Book shortlist without a Pelevin book? I’m still waiting for a Pelevin novel to enjoy from start to finish, so who knows, maybe this is my year. In any case, another book covering multiple centuries; I’m betting the title sums it all up well. (A meager 416 pages!)

• Sergei Samsonov’s Соколиный рубеж(The Falcon’s Line/Position? But perhaps not: thanks to a reader review on Ozon.ru, it sounds like this refers to limits and extremes…). Another 700-page novel: this one’s about World War 2 air battles… This book—in manuscript form and under the pseudonym Gorshkovozov—won Samsonov a 2015 Debut Prize for full-length prose.  

• Sergei Shargunov’s Катаев: «Погоня за вечной весной» (Kataev: “The Pursuit of Eternal Spring”). About author Valentin Kataev. (704 pages!)

Disclaimers: I’m a member of the Big Book Award’s jury, the Literary Academy.

Up Next: The Yasnaya Polyana Award longlist. Futurism, finally. I think…

NatsBest Shortlist 2017: Lizok’s Better-Late-Than-Never Edition

The National Bestseller Award announced a seven-book shortlist on April 14—oh, the shame that I’m this late! This is a wonderful and rare case where I’m interested in nearly all the books on a shortlist. Here’s the list, including the number of points awarded by the “big” jury, plus links to jury members’ reviews, which are easier to find than ever on the new NatsBest site. They are a fantastic resource. NatsBest secretary Vadim Levental’s comments about the list are here. The winner will be announced on June 3.

• Anna Kozlova’s F20 (10 points) is apparently a novel about a teenage girl with mental illness. Jury reviews are here.
• Elena Dolgopyat’s Родина (Motherland) (9 points) is a collection of short stories by an author whose work I’ve enjoyed reading in the past. I haven’t read this collection yet—I don’t even own it—but have to admit that I’m already rooting for Dolgopyat because her past work has impressed me so much. Jury reviews are here.
• Andrei Filimonov’s Головастик и святые (known in English as Manikin and the Saints) (7 points) is represented by the Elkost literary agency so I’ll leave the description to them; it’s here. Jury reviews are here.
• Figl’-Migl’s Эта страна (This Country) (6 points) is a book I want to know nothing about: it’s enough for me to know that it concerns political prisoners from the early Soviet period. I’ve been waiting for it and F-M, whom I still haven’t read, won the NatsBest a few years ago. Despite mixed reviews—running the full gamut, something that I often take as a positive since it generally means the book gets under the reader’s skin—since the NatsBest longlist came out, I’m still very interested. Jury reviews are here.
• Aleksandr Brener’s Жития убиенных художников (Life Stories [as in lives, in the context of “lives of saints”] of Killed Artists) (6 points) is, according to the publisher, Hylaea, a book composed of brief stories/chapters about Brener’s experiences in various places around the world, looking at people, meetings, attachments, impressions… Jury reviews are here.
• Sergei Beliakov’s Тень Мазепы (Mazepa’s Shadow) (6 points) is nonfiction about Ukrainian history during the Gogol epoch. Jury reviews are here.
• Andrei Rubanov’s Патриот (The Patriot) (6 points) sounds, based on the BGS literary agency’s description (here), like a very Rubanovian Rubanov novel. Rubanov’s very good at showing contemporary Russian life. Jury reviews are here.

Disclaimers: The usual plus I translated NatsBest secretary Vadim Levental’s novel Masha Regina.

Up Next: Big Book longlist post, also late! And then, hmm, the Afanasy Mamedov novella set in Baku that I mentioned in my last post. And some reading in English, including Charlotte Hobson’s The Vanishing Futurist, which is perfect reading for (and about since it’s set in Moscow around the time of the revolution) a hectic time; it pairs nicely with James Womack’s translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky in a book entitled “Vladimir Mayakovsky” & Other Poems, which arrived last week. I’ll be reading other translations to prepare for a roundtable during Russian Literature Week in early May, hosted by Read Russia in New York.

Favorite Russian Writers А to Я: Rybakov

Alphabet favorites are back! Though my entry for the Letter R (Р) is a bit limited in terms of all-out favorites, there are enough writers I like—with the hope for turns to the even-more-positive—that I’m not going to skip R like I skipped N and O.

My one true favorite for R is Anatolii Rybakov, despite my somewhat limited experience reading him: Rybakov’s Дети Арбата (Children of the Arbat), the first volume of a trilogy, is enough. I read the trilogy before I started writing the blog but I did keep a book diary then, where I praised the first volume most, called the second “awful,” and summed up with, “The books were definitely flawed but they did manage to capture something important: the mood and stories of a lost portion of a generation.” Rybakov’s Тяжёлый песок (Heavy Sand) (previous post) left me with mixed feelings a few years ago, too, but I suspect I’d probably appreciate its characters and storytelling techniques far more now, after reading so much more fiction (much of it by Margarita Khemlin, who’s also from Chernigov) set in Ukraine. I also have a sentimental reason for favoriting Rybakov: he made a reading in my department when I was in grad school. I think this was in 1986, though I remember almost nothing except that Rybakov made a positive impression.

Another R-letter writer I’ve enjoyed is Irina Ratushinskaya; I read Alyona Kojevnikov’s translation of Ratushinskaya’s prison camp memoir Grey Is the Color of Hope in the late eighties or early nineties. I read a fair bit of fiction and nonfiction about prison camps when I was in college but I think Ratushinskaya’s book has stuck with me through the years because her story was contemporary: she was in prison in 1983, the year I first visited the Soviet Union. Ratushinskaya’s Тень портрета (The Portrait’s Shadow) didn’t impress me much in my preblog years but I’ve heard good things about her Одесситы (The Odessans), which I bought last year and keep meaning to read sooner rather than later.

As for others… Andrei Rubanov is another writer that’s left me with mixed impressions: his Chlorophyllia (previous post) and All That Glitters (previous post) were both enjoyable and pretty decent but just didn’t feel quite as good as I thought they should/could/would be. I read some of the stories in Rubanov’s Shameful Feats/Exploits at the beach last summer and thought they were decent, too. As with Dina Rubina (see below!), Rubanov’s short fiction feels more controlled and focused than his novels. I like Rubanov’s ability to combine genres and appreciate his blunt talk very, very much.

I’ve also enjoyed some of Dina Rubina’s writing, particularly her short story “Apples from Shlitzbutter’s Garden” (previous post), though I find some of her writing too overstuffed with detail. I have a couple collections of Rubina’s short and medium-length works—several readers have particularly recommended her shorter, earlier writings to me—and hope to find more that I like.

Remizov.

As for classics, hmm, well, I guess I’m pretty much at zero… I have some vague remembrance of reading Kondratii Ryleev’s poetry in grad school but am probably more likely to seek out Aleksei Remizov, whom I seem to have ignored all these years. He sounds like a stylistically interesting writer, so I’d welcome recommendations! And there’s one modern poet that’s been recommended to me many times over the years, Nikolai Rubtsov, whose books I received as gifts back in the late eighties or early nineties.

Up Next: A trip report about the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in slushy Boston. Igor Savelyev’s Tereshkova Flies to Mars, known as Mission to Mars in English: Amanda Love Darragh’s translation will be out this summer from Glas. And then Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Laurus.

Image: Aleksei Remizov, via Wikipedia.

All Sorts of Shorts: Short Stories from Noir and Snegirev + Two Short Summaries

After calling the Moscow Noir short story anthology “a dark book indeed” two years ago, I think I can sum up St. Petersburg Noir, a new collection edited by Julia Goumen and Natalia Smirnova for Akashic’s noir anthology series, as “a pretty dark book.” Put another way: If Moscow is pitch black, St. Peterburg is moving toward deep dusk.

I loved the brutal, elemental scariness of the Moscow book—and recognize how very skewed my perspective is after living and working near all too many Moscow crime scenes—but wonder if the slightly lighter St. Petersburg collection, which is very decent, might find a broader readership.

Bits of St. Petersburg Noir’s stories blended together in my mind as I read, melding into a composite portrait of a city loaded with poverty, aimlessness, drugs, back streets, squalid apartments, ballet, and canals… plus murder and other violent misdeeds set amidst cultural sites and monuments. Here are a few stories that especially distinguished themselves for me:

Andrei Rubanov’s “Barely a Drop,” translated by Marian Schwartz, felt the most classically noir to me, focusing on a writer who takes the train to St. Petersburg to spy on his wife, whom he suspects of having an affair. Rubanov is an economical writer who can fit a lot into a short story.

The first story in the book, Andrei Kivinov’s “Training Day,” translated by Polly Gannon, looks at law enforcement, morgue runs, and everyday fears (e.g. elevators, one of my own Russia phobias) with an apt combination of seaminess and humor.

“The Sixth of June,” by Sergei Nosov and translated by Gannon, stars a first-person narrator who quickly introduces himself as a would-be assassin with plans to act on Pushkin’s birthday.

I thought Julia Belomlinsky’s “The Phantom of the Opera Forever,” translated by Ronald Meyer, a revenge tale, was one of the edgiest stories in the book. It begins with a small chunk of Crime and Punishment and moves on to “All our life here—it’s a fucking Dostoevsky nightmare!”

Though Pavel Krusanov’s “The Hairy Sutra,” translated by Amy Pieterse, felt silly and predictable with its museum zoologists, conflicts, and specimens, it turned out to be one of the most oddly memorable stories in the book because of its distinct setting, characters, and exhibits.

Still, the scariest and darkest story I’ve read lately is in the thick journal Новый мир: Alexander Snegirev’s “Внутренний враг” (“The Internal Enemy”). Snegirev’s story is rooted in sociopolitical and historical tension: a young man, Misha, gets a call about an inheritance and then finds out his family history isn’t quite what he thought. Snegirev plays on Misha’s idealism, identity, and dread of the KGB as he builds a creepy, phantasmagoric family drama set in a house that feels haunted. The story’s psychological suspense and intensity surprised me—and sucked me in—after some early passages that felt a bit conventional. 

Finally, two novels I don’t plan to finish but that I want to mention because they’re both finalists for the 2012 Big Book Award: The first 140 pages of Vladimir Makanin’s Две сестры и Кандинский (Two Sisters and Kandinsky) also center around societal divides and the KGB as Makanin examines the consequences of informing. Alas, the novel, which draws on Chekhovian themes and reads almost like a play, didn’t hold my interest and I stopped reading after the first act section. I also had trouble with Sergei Nosov’s Франсуаза, или Путь к леднику (Françoise Or the Way to the Glacier): eavesdropping on a guy who chats with his herniated disc just isn’t my thing. There’s more to the book than that, of course, including a Russia-India contrast, leeches, a stolen lung, and smoking cessation courses, but the whole package felt gimmicky, contrived, and surprisingly dull. Françoise was also shortlisted for the 2012 NatsBest.

Up Next: Dmitrii Lipskerov’s 40 лет Чанчжоэ (The Forty Years of Chanchzhoeh/Changzhuoe), Ergali Ger’s Koma, Andrei Rubanov’s Стыдные подвиги (Shameful Feats/Exploits… I’m still not sure…), and Marina Stepnova’s Женщины Лазаря (The Women of Lazarus/Lazarus’s Women).

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. I received a review copy of St. Petersburg Noir from Akashic Books, thank you very much! I have met and chatted with Julia Goumen, one of the book’s editors, on numerous occasions. I enjoyed meeting Alexander Snegirev, whom I’d known online for a couple years, at BookExpo America in June… I promised him I’d be honest in my assessment of “The Internal Enemy.” And, of course, I was!

Image Credit: Photo of St. Petersburg from uun, via sxc.hu.