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.

Big Book 3: Aflatuni’s Earthly Paradise

Hm. Sukhbat Aflatuni’s Рай земной (Earthly Paradise) left me at something of a loss. After reading it during the summer, I referred to it as “a bit confused” in an “Up Next” section. I’ll stick with that assessment, but I think I’ll append that analysis with a line from novelist Daniel Orlov’s July review on godliteratury.ru, which states things even more directly: “Увы, получился очень хорошо написанный и очень скучный роман.” Which means that, alas, it turned out to be a very well written but very boring novel.

Books like Earthly Paradise leave me at a loss largely because they leave so little trace, even immediately after finishing. (Perhaps that’s what leaves the impression of “boring”?) My problems with Earthly Paradise arise largely because Aflatuni does certain things (like write!) pretty well but the book’s individual elements – plotlines, characters, overall feel, thematic motifs – just don’t meld enough to create what I consider a cohesive and satisfying novel. This particularly hurts after his Ant King (previous post), where two very different sections somehow, mysteriously, fit together with a whole lot of verve.

Given the mismatch (or maybe mishmash?) of narrative lines and structure, Earthly Paradise read best to me as the story of a friendship between two women – Plyusha and Natalie – who both live in a building next to a site where Poles were shot during the 1930s. There is also a thick thread that (I’ll admit) made me glaze over so much that I barely remember it: it involves a manuscript by a Polish Orthodox priest. (The manuscript tore me away from plotlines interested me more.) There are also lots of mentions of the Garden of Eden, the Fall, Adam and Eve, and other religion-related topics in the Plyusha/Natalie portions of the book. Those felt more organic to me than the manuscript itself thanks to, for example, conversations, but neither the biblical references nor the priest’s spirit could knit the novel together for me. As so often happens in novels (at least for my picky reading habits), Aflatuni does very nicely creating vivid, memorable characters but fails to place them within a framework that allows a vivid, memorable novel to develop.

Plyusha, Natalie, their characteristic tics, and their friendship were what kept me reading. Plyusha works with archives at a museum that focuses on political repression and she crochets little doilies for everybody. She feels like she’s an ear (large and warm!) to listen to Natalie, who’s more of a livewire and has read War and Peace three times. (How could I not like her after that!?) As if W&P weren’t enough, Natalie is even accused of being an instrument of the dark side. Plyusha’s mother sells Herbalife. Natalie takes karate lessons. Plyusha has an odd relationship with her former professor, Natalie doesn’t do well with her mother, Natalie accuses Plyusha of leading a sheltered life, things happen at the execution site… and so on. They kept me going until the end.

Even so, I came up feeling pretty empty, despite having met two characters with good potential who ended up squandered because the larger questions in the novel – political repression, history, contemporary views of history and political repression, religion – felt a little like (to use a horrible, worn cliché) round pegs for square holes. Or vice versa. They can get crammed and jammed together, but the result isn’t comfortable or elegant; they need custom finish work to be a good fit. Which is unfortunate because I enjoyed Plyusha and Natalie’s company, their situations had lots of potential, and the awful history of the NKVD’s Polish operation deserves discussion, more than it gets here. I feel more regret than usual that a novel fell short for me in large part because it tried too hard to toggle between a primary narrative and an inserted text. Given reader comments on labirint.ru I have to suspect, too, that Orlov (with whom I don’t agree about everything, though I second all his final conclusions, including that the historical and political elements of the book don’t click) and I are more critical than many, if not most, readers who might be more content to skip, skim, and forgive.

Up next: Anna Kozlova’s Rurik, Liubov Barinova’s brand-new Eve, two books in English, and some other books in Russian, including Alisa Ganieva’s biography of Lilya Brik, which I’m continuing to enjoy, and the very interesting Big Book finalist biography of Venedikt Erofeev by Oleg Lekmanov, Mikhail Sverdlov, and Ilya Simanovsky.

Disclaimers and Disclosures. The usual.

Big Book 2: Evgenia Nekrasova’s Kalechina-Malechina

I seem to be reading a lot of authors who create out-of-kilter worlds that demand extra attention: deciphering Alexander Pelevin’s The Four requires a reread and Alexei Salnikov’s Petrovs and Indirect left me feeling the need to repeat, too. And then there’s Evgenia Nekrasova’s Kalechina-Malechina, which I read happily until, all of a sudden, the young heroine, Katya, met a kikimora in her kitchen in the middle of the book. Although the change felt abrupt – I’d been used to Katya’s dreary life with her parents, wretched classmates, and teacher who smokes in the classroom (whoa, shades of grad school!) and was expecting an entirely different sort of change – after reading some of Nekrasova’s short fiction, I realized she was taking it easy on her readers with the kikimora. I now feel ready for just about anything, though I’m still glad I read the book in two large chunks, before-kikimora and after-kikimora. Reading Salnikov’s Petrovs chapter-by-chapter worked best for me, too, to let the oddities and details settle. Sometimes that’s the best way to absorb them.

And so. Kalechina-Malechina is, as I’ve summarized in previous posts, a shortish novel about a schoolgirl who lives outside a large “Gulliverish” city. I jotted in my book that she’s a girl after my own heart: she owns a dumbphone, sleeps late, loves night, and is an independent latchkey kid. She’s also a lousy at needlecrafts and her teacher threatens to send her to a school for slow learners if she can’t crochet some mittens. I called the novel “edgy” earlier, too, because Nekrasova doesn’t hold back on details of daily horrors and offenses, some of which recall chernukha: beyond the inane mittens we find, among other things, a bullying boy (he even swears at school); there’s abuse (and disgusting latrines) at summer camp and with an adult who, theoretically, should be trusted; and, though I can’t find the spot, I seem to recall that a boy (the bully?) drops his pants at school. Oh and Katya breaks her prissy friend’s nice smartphone, causing a rift. After these problems, the kikimora’s appearance has an almost light(e)ning effect: there are some wonderfully comic scenes where the two of them take a train to visit a relative so Katya can play loan shark for the afternoon to collect on a debt to her father, passing off the kikimora as a visiting relative during the trip.

All sorts of other things happen in Kalechina-Malechina, which takes its title, by the way, from this poem by Alexei Remizov, though I’m less interested in the plot – and its resolutions – than the novel’s stylistics and motifs. Returning to the title, this master’s thesis (PDF here!) by Magdelena Mot notes childhood and rituals in the cycle Посолонь (Sunward or Sunwise) in which “Kalechina-Malechina” appears: Mot’s abstract notes “Posolon’ calls for the regaining of a lost cyclicity and looks back in time at the common folk’s way of life.” And “… in Posolon’ Russia is all about folklore, joyful games, tales and rituals.” This fits nicely with Katya’s experiences, where life is anything but simple but she creates her own rituals to lend normalcy where perversion – of rules, hierarchies, behaviors, and kindnesses – has taken over.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s a Platonovian (or Platonovesque?) feel to Nekrasova’s writing. There are neologisms: she constantly plays on the word “выросший,” an adjective used as a noun for “grown-up” by adding a “не-” for someone who’s not grown-up, meaning a kid, plus, as another example, Katya’s father “даладничал” (“wellfined”) in one spot after smiling. Even more important, there’s also what Dmitry Bykov calls a “платоновская тоска” (“Platonovian melancholy/anguish/yearning/pining/despair” – “тоска” is, after all, a flexible word) to what I’ll call Nekrasova’s worldview. As in Platonov, at least as I read him, there’s a sense of feeling crushed but there’s also a strange exuberance, partly, I think, because of his stylistic unusualness. That feeling, that sense, fits neatly with Nekrasova’s writing about twisted aspects of seemingly contemporary, gray (the color of poor Katya’s hair!) life outside a Gulliver-sized city.

Olesya Gonserovskaya’s illustrations 
add a lot to the book.
(Left to right: Katya and the kikimora.)

I admire those and other aspects of K-M but I think what strikes me most is a gratitude that is more social: I’ve used the word “edgy” to describe the novel and appreciate the way Nekrasova’s angle on Katya’s world, combined with folklore motifs (the kikimora), the references to Remizov, and even some humor, serve to update and enliven the chernukha genre by depicting crushingly (that word again!) awful circumstances – for a child, no less – alongside mystical and mythical elements. This occurs in Nekrasova’s short fiction, too: in “Несчастливая Москва” (“Unhappy Moscow,” where the title clearly echoes Platonov) strange daily changes in Moscow (like people suddenly speaking English instead of Russian) affect Nina, a cheerful, positive go-getter who refuses to leave the city, and in the beautifully composed “Лакшми” (“Lakshmi”) in which, hmm, a woman handles spousal abuse in a unique way. Nekrasova’s main characters’ – note that they’re all female – blend inner strength and outer, even supernatural, forces that combine to lend them abilities that empower. Although Kalechina-Malechina worked very nicely for me once I accepted the kikimora’s presence, I think the several works of short fiction that I’ve read thus far are even better because short-form fiction meshes so perfectly with Nekrasova’s direct, concise style and ability to describe social ills and various types of (that word again, too!) perversions with colorful, biting vignettes and details that feel both real and otherwordly. I’m looking forward to reading more.

This is the second 2019 Big Book Award finalist that I’ve read in its entirety. The first was Grigory Sluzhitel’s Savely’s Days (previous post), which also contains excellent illustrations.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. I received a copy of Kalechina-Malechina from the publisher after Elena Shubina recommended it to me last fall. Nekrasova sent me a care package of her stories, including a collection that won a Litsei award in 2018. Thank you to all involved!

Up Next: More fun with genres and fears – a perfect combo for summer – thanks to Valeria Verbinina’s retro detective novel Московское время (Moscow Time).

Lizok’s Summer Reading Plan: 2019 Big Book Finalists

The Big Book Award named twelve finalists last week and I breathed a big old sigh of relief because this year’s short list looks so much better – infinitely better – to me than last year’s*. I’ve already read several of the books, all of which were very good in their own ways; a few others are already calling out to me. The list is an interesting combination of familiar and not-so-familiar authors, though there only two – Gonorovsky and Bakharevich – were completely unfamiliar to me before the Big Book Long List. Perhaps most interesting: unless I’ve really missed the point here about something, there’s only one work of nonfiction this year, a biography of Venedikt Erofeev, which pretty much had to make the finals.

• Sukhbat Aflatuni’s Рай земной (Earthly Paradise? Heaven on Earth?) looks back at political repression during the Stalin era, apparently layering fantasy and history. (If, that is, the book’s description is to be believed!) I’m very much looking forward to this one after Aflatuni’s The Ant King.
• Olgerd Bakharevich says his Собаки Европы (The Dogs of Europe), a 768-page 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.
• Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Брисбен (Brisbane) tells the story of a virtuoso guitar player who discovers he has an incurable medical condition.
• Aleksandr Gonorovsky’s Собачий лес (Dog Forest, though I’m suspecting layers of meaning here…) apparently combines a lot of genres and addresses topics including historical trauma.
• Linor Goralik’s Все, способные дышать дыхание (literally something like All Capable of Breathing a Breath, perhaps? Or maybe “Everybody”? I’m interested in figuring out how to read this title.) The brief description introducing this excerpt says the book concerns a country that’s facing a huge catastrophe and discovers that empathy can be a double-edged sword.
• The trio of Oleg Lekmanov, Mikhail Sverdlov, and Ilya Simanovsky hit the list for the biography Венедикт Ерофеев: посторонний (Venedikt Erofeev: The Outsider). Oliver Ready’s review for The TLS notes this, which makes me look forward to the book very much: “In fact, this is not one biography but two, for between each chapter comes an interlude devoted to Moskva- Petushki.”
• Evgenia Nekrasova’s Калечина-Малечина (Kalechina-Malechina) is vivid, imaginative, and edgy in its description of a schoolgirl who is bullied and often left to her own devices.
• Alexei Salnikov’s Опосредованно (Indirectly perhaps? This is what a colleague and I think might fit…) 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. I enjoyed Indirectly very much but reading it electronically wasn’t enough so I’m going to reread it as a printed book.
• Roman Senchin’s Дождь в Париже (Rain in Paris) is about a Russian man who’s in Paris reflecting on his life in Russia.
• Grigory Sluzhitel’s Дни Савелия (Savely’s Days) (previous post) is the first-cat narrative I so enjoyed last year.
• Vyacheslav Stavetsky’s Жизнь А.Г. (The Life of A.G.) concerns a Spanish dictator.
• Guzel Yakhina’s Дети мои (Children of the Volga) blends history and fairy tale motifs in a novel about a Volga German man and his daughter.

*With one exception: I’m sorry (yet again!) to see how few books written by women hit the short list. Since I don’t know what books were nominated, it’s impossible to say what the starting material was for the first two rounds of selection but, looking at the long list, I can say that I already read Anna Nemzer’s The Round (previous post) and thought it was pretty good, couldn’t quite get into Ksenia Buksha’s Opens In though it seemed well-written and solidly structured, and still have several other longlisters written by women either on the shelf to read or on order from a generous friend willing to travel with lots of book baggage. I am looking forward to reading those books and the other finalists! [Added on 6/11/2019.]

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. I’m a member of the Literary Academy, the large jury for the Big Book Award. I’ve translated works by three authors on the list, know a couple more, and have received copies of some of the books from various parties.

Up Next: Nekrasova’s Kalechina-Malechina, plus some of her shorter work. And then Alexander Pelevin’s Четверо (The Four, perhaps, though I’m still not sure), which I’m enjoying for its blend of three plotlines: futuristic space travel, a 1930s detective story set in Crimea, and a present-day description of a patient at a St. Petersburg psychiatric hospital who claims to have contact with someone from another planet. It’s lively and entertaining.

Cats Are Not People, Too: Sluzhitel’s Savely’s Days [Edit: Big Book One]

Grigory Sluzhitel’s Дни Савелия (literally Savely’s Days) came as a bit of a surprise, despite hearing a rave recommendation from Evgeny Vodolazkin months before the book came out. I’m pretty picky about animal books – though I read Charlotte’s Web a million times as a child and loved Anna Starobinets’s Catlantis a few years ago – but Sluzhitel’s novel, narrated by a male cat named Savely (diminutive Savva), who was likely named for a brand of tvorog, is so affecting and charming (a word I rarely use) that it made me smile, laugh, and even sob. Savva’s story isn’t just a chronicle of a cat’s life, it’s also a love letter to Moscow (something I’d felt in my reading and was happy to see Sluzhitel’ confirm in this interview) and a bittersweet story of kinship, friendship, and separations. Sluzhitel’s writing is complemented by atmospheric black-and-white illustrations from Aleksandra Nikolaenko, winner of last year’s Russian Booker Prize.

And so. As the novel’s title indicates, Savva, a very literate and literary cat, tells his life story, beginning with memories from the womb, birth in a Zaporozhets, and early life in a Chiquita banana box. Savva’s childhood is pretty happy, featuring food from benefactors, regular visits to see his aunt (who lives in a front-loading washing machine), and good relationships with his sisters and mother. His upbringing is solid: his mother tells him that cats don’t really have nine lives so there’s no sense in taking chances by walking in front of motorized transportation. Savva loses touch with his family after a well-meaning human takes him in. He’s not particularly happy in his new life despite nice possessions like a laser mouse, scratchers, and rubber balls, not to mention a Sunday ritual of climbing into a tea pot. He ends up bolting on the way to a vet visit (he’s already been neutered), leaving Vitya, a bookish teenager who’s something of an outcast, catless.

I didn’t count the major changes in Savva’s tale but he cycles through quite a few lives in the book (I’ll go lightly to avoid spoilers), serving as a rat catcher at the Tretyakov Gallery and having to co-habit, albeit briefly, with a parrot named Iggy, a situation not fated to end well. My favorite of Savva’s hosts is a young Kirgiz man who rescues Savva after he’s attacked and left badly injured. After Askar is fired from his job at Gorky Park (there’s been smoking…) he finds work as a bicycle deliveryman and brings Savva with him. (They even deliver food to a theater in a scene that seems to include Sluzhitel’ in a cameo appearance.) Beyond additional lovely descriptions of Moscow during that period – the city filled with morning sun, puddles drying after a night downpour, everything looking harmonious and beautiful, a look I love so much – Askar, a migrant living under tenuous conditions with friends who’ve pooled their money for Savva’s care and feeding, was my favorite of the human characters in the novel. That’s partly because of his big heart but I also wonder if I found Askar (and the last pair of people who care for Savva) the most convincing or fitting of the humans in the book because he lives on the margins of contemporary Moscow life, giving him something in common with Savva, who’s a wanderer. Savva wants to see the world (or at least Moscow) and even gives the impression of being something of an existentialist with a phobia for commitment, too. At least, that is, until he meets a beautiful young cat, in some of the book’s nicest passages.

I could go on and on about favorite passages – why Savva’s fired from the Tretyakov, psychedelic experiments with valerian tooth drops, or his life in a doghouse with his love and a dog – but will sum up by agreeing with Vodolazkin’s assessment, in his introduction to Savely’s Days, that Sluzhitel’ draws on his acting skills and becomes a full-fledged cat in the novel. Of course that’s all too easy for me to say because a) I’ve never been a cat and b) my own two cats don’t seem to write. (They do read and translate with me, though, so perhaps they’re holding out on us?) Sluzhitel’ is so good at writing about a cat’s life that, though I enjoyed the entire book, I found Savva’s descriptions of his own life more convincing than his passages about his humans’ backstories. The humans’ stories felt like slivers of a portrait of Moscow in the twenty-first century, but they only really came alive for me when Savva was interacting with his people in some way, by climbing into the teapot, observing Vitya’s grandmother, or making sushi deliveries. Or sitting inside someone’s coat on a park bench during a time of mourning.

Edwina translating Vodolazkin’s Aviator.

Somehow (don’t ask me how since I’m not sure I understand it myself) this doesn’t just feel like a matter of Shklovsky’s остранение (ostranenie, defamiliarization), something else Vodolazkin mentions in his introduction. It feels to me as if Sluzhitel’ isn’t just showing the world from a novel (sorry) perspective. He’s an actor who’s an author (and an author who’s an actor) and channels his inner catness to thoroughly inhabit a character who’s not even of his own species. In doing so, he manages to find an internal logic for his text that makes the feline perspective feel perfectly natural, as if it’s not just a literary device. Savva may be a cat but he can tell a story – an exceedingly rare quality these days – at least as well as he can chase his tail. Maybe I’m too willing to suspend my disbelief and/or maybe I’m too close to cats to be objective, but what makes Savva such a successful figure for me is that, yes, fine, he’s able to read, to understand human dialogue, and to write, but he’s a cat. And he wants to be a cat, to chase his tail, to try valerian, and not to answer to humans. Or to become a human. Just like my two officemates, who often lie on my desk and make themselves available for patting when I’m working on difficult passages (it helps!) but leave the room as soon as I start reading out loud, though perhaps that’s because they can’t relate to my books since I have yet to translate a book narrated by a cat.

Disclaimers: A friend provided me with an electronic copy of Savely’s Days; I’m going to buy a print copy in Moscow next month. I’ve also corresponded a bit with Grigory Sluzhitel’.

Up next: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M., and Vladimir Sharov’s The Rehearsals in Oliver Ready’s translation. And Vladimir Danikhnov’s weird Lullaby, a Booker finalist about serial killings that has shades of Platonov. I’m also working on my Big Book reading, with Alexander Arkhangelsky’s Бюро проверки (Verification Bureau), which has finally taken a dramatic turn.