The 2015 Russian Booker Shortlist & a Nobel Note

The Russian Booker Prize jury announced the 2015 Russian Booker shortlist on Friday. What feels most notable this year is that the writers are so young: Pokrovsky, born in 1954, has been on the planet the longest, Senchin is in his mid-forties, and the rest are in their thirties. The list also feels pretty varied and appealing (!). The (!) is because some Russian Booker shortlists have seemed a bit, hmm, dry. Here you go:

• Alisa Ganieva’s Жених и невеста (Bride and Groom), which Carol Apollonio is currently translating for Deep Vellum Publishing, for release in 2017. The novel apparently looks at the institution of marriage (including tradition and superstition) among young people in rural Dagestan.
• Vladimir Danikhnov’s Колыбельная (Lullaby). This book’s description says it’s a noirish novel set in a nameless southern city beset with serial killings. It also indicates the writing reminds of Platonov’s. An excerpt is available on Ozon.ru; epigraph from Mickey Spillane.
• Yuri Pokrovsky’s Среди людей (Among People) is set in the 1970s, also in a nameless city (top secret military stuff), and is composed of 49 connected “fragments” related to nine main characters.
• Roman Senchin’s Зона затопления (Flood Zone) examines what happens when everyone’s forced out of a village to make way for a hydroelectric plant. Not my favorite Senchin—I couldn’t bring myself to finish it and my favorite is still The Yeltyshevs—but Flood Zone is on this year’s Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana shortlists, too. I have to think it will win a major award as a sort of “makeup call” after The Yeltyshevs didn’t win. Excerpts available on Журнальный зал; I read more than half the book and thought “Чернушка” was one of the best chapters I read.
• Alexander Snegiev’s Вера (Vera or Faith, depending on whether you’d like to translate the meaning of the name or not…). Either way, Vera was on the NatsBest shortlist, too; I’ve seen Snegirev’s writing in Vera compared to Platonov’s, too (for example here). I enjoyed reading the beginning of Vera on an electronic reader but was just jonesing to take real notes in the margin, with a real pencil…
• Guzel Yakina’s Зулейха открывает глаза (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes) is also a finalist for the Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana awards. I very much enjoyed reading Zuleikha and translating excerpts was at least as much fun (previous post). An excerpt is available on Ozon.ru.

In other news, I’m sure everybody already knows that Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature last week. With my big old fiction bias, I haven’t read any of her books but thought I’d note current translations in English. (Thanks to a project for the Institute of Translation last week, I just happen to know what’s on the list!) I’ll just mention the English-language titles here, without the original Russian. There may be more excerpts of various works available online: they aren’t easy to track down due to varying spellings, titles, and multiple versions. These variables make my poor, addled head spin. Please note, too, that the author’s last name is sometimes spelled Alexievitch. Here’s her page on the site of her literary agent, Galina Dursthoff so you can keep track of new books on the way. I welcome any and all corrections and additions to this list—I’m sure there are other pieces available!

Books

I think the Nobel Prize’s site has the best listing of current translated books so will send you there rather than retype book information. Time Second-Hand, which was a Big Book Award finalist last year and won the reader award, will be out from Fitzcarraldo Editions next year, in Bela Shayevich’s translation.  

Shorter Pieces and Excerpts that I believe are from the same cycle or collection:

• “The Wondrous Deer of the Eternal Hunt,” a short story translated by Marian Schwartz
• “Landscape of Loneliness,” translated by Joanne Turnbull (more about it here, from Glas)

There are also several pieces in various issues of Autodafe: The Journal of the International Parliament of Writers; some pages are blocked so I’m not always sure exactly what’s where or there.

• “Inquiries into Love in Russia,” translated by Marian Schwartz
• Three pieces, not sure who translated them…
• “Go Where You Shouldn’t,” translated by Marian Schwartz

Disclaimers: Having translated work by Senchin and Yakhina, and met Ganieva and Snegirev multiple times.

Up Next: So many books! Narine Abgaryan’s People Who Are Always With Me.

Lots more books from the Big Book finalist list, including Boris Yekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e, which I finished but didn’t like very much (at all), some books I didn’t finish, plus the ones I’m working on now: Alexei Varlamov’s The Imagined Wolf (it really is “imagined”), Valery Zalotukha’s super-long but ridiculously mesmerizing The Candle, and Igor Virabov’s “biography” of Andrei Voznesensky that I might want to call “kitschy” or “tacky,” though/therefore that factor does keep me turning the pages. And there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages, all with very small type. We’ll see if I tire…

The 2013 Russian Booker Prize Long List… All of It

Every so often, I enjoy going through an entire book award long list, methodically looking for books I might enjoy reading. I’m not quite sure what possessed me to sift through the entire 2013 (Russian!) Booker Prize long list on a slightly cloudy but warm and very beach-worthy Saturday afternoon, but there you have it.

So here’s the long list, in Russian alphabetical order by author, with comments, some of which may be a bit odd and uneven since many of the books don’t seem to have gotten much attention… or at least not the kind of attention that I.I. Google recognizes and rewards. I starred the books I’m most interested in. The short list will be announced on October 3.

1. Aleksandr Arkhangel’skii: Музей революции (Museum of the Revolution). I always hate to start a list on a negative note but I tried reading this novel and just didn’t get very far, due to lack of interest; I didn’t even read far enough to get into the museum conflict…

2. * Nikolai Baitov: Любовь Муры (Mura’s Love). The publisher’s blurb says this epistolary novel is about two women’s forbidden love in the 1930s and 1940s, though two reviews I looked at dispute the “forbidden” part. There are, however, two women. And there is love.

3. * Nadezhda Belen’kaia. Рыбы молчат по-испански (Fish Keep Quiet in Spanish). A novel about international adoptions of Russian children.

4. Vladimir Vester: Отель разбитых сердец (Heartbreak Hotel). The book’s subtitle, Секс, кино, один ствол и вечно живой Элвис Пресли—Sex, the Movies, One Gun, and an/the Eternally Alive Elvis Presley—seems to say it all.

5. Evgenii (Eugene) Vodolazkin: Лавр (Laurus). One of my favorites (previous post). Already a finalist for this year’s NatsBest and Big Book.

6. Andrei Volos: Возвращение в Панджруд (excerpts) (Return to Panjrud). Volos, who is originally from Dushanbe, often writes about Central Asia. His agent’s site says this novel is about a poet in the Middle Ages. Finalist for this year’s Big Book.

7. * Valerii Votrin: Логопед (The Speech Therapist). The Speech Therapist’s publisher describes the book as depicting a “linguistic antiutopia.” There are two main characters: a speech therapist and a journalist. Watch your spelling and punctuation, people!

8. * Alisa Ganieva: Праздничная гора (excerpt) (Holiday Mountain). A novel about Dagestan… in which Dagestan becomes separate from Russia, resulting in problems and not-so-happy endings.

9. Vladimir Gubailovskii: Учитель цинизма (The Teacher of Cynicism or Cynicism’s Teacher?). A 2012 Big Book finalist. The main character is math student at Moscow State University in the late Soviet era.

10. Denis Gutsko: Бета-самец (Beta Male). This sounds like a novel about a middle-aged guy (not an alpha!) with good connections but not a lot of ambition who is presented with a situation that changes his life.

Menshikov in Berezovo (1888)

11. Andrei Demkin: Ненаписанный дневник (excerpt) (The Unwritten Diary). A historical novel about prince Aleksandr Menshikov and his exile, and the work of artist Vasilii Surikov, who really did paint Menshikov. Hmm.

12. Oleg Ermakov: С той стороны дерева (From the Other Side of the Tree). Apparently about a man who goes to Lake Baikal and finds everything he was looking for and more, including love and local myths.

13. Andrei Ivanov: Харбинские мотыльки (The Moths of Harbin). A novel about Russians in Estonia during 1920-1940. This sounds like a difficult but interesting novel.

14. Aleksandr (Alexander) Kabakov: Старик и ангел (The Old Man and the Angel). A professor in his seventies has regrets about his life, then a heart attack changes all. A review on Timeout.ru compares Kabakov’s writing to Aksyonov’s.

15. Anatolii Kurchatkin: Чудо хождения по водам (The Miracle of Walking on Water). According to the Tver’ libraries’ description: a man suddenly discovers he can walk on water, though only when other people are around.

16. Maya Kucherskaya: Тетя Мотя (Auntie Motya a.k.a. Auntie Mina). Another one I couldn’t quite get into: this book about a couple’s not-so-successful life together felt too contrived to me. As of this writing, it’s the top gatherer of Facebook “likes” among 2013 Big Book finalists, though.

17. * Vadim Levental’: Маша Регина (Masha Regina). Levental’s debut novel is about a woman from the provinces who becomes a world-famous film director. Another 2013 Big Book finalist.

18. Olesya Nikolaeva. Меценат. Жизнеописание Александра Берга. (The Patron/Sponsor/Philanthropist. The Life of Aleksandr Berg). A detective novel about the murder of a monastery official.

19. Aleksei Slapovskii. Вспять. Хроника перевернувшегося времени (Backward. A Chronicle of Time Upended (or something of the sort!)). Time goes backward in a provincial town, giving people another last Friday instead of a new Sunday. Sounds like déjà vu all over again.

20. Sergei Solov’ev: Адамов мост (Adam’s Bridge). This one seems to defy summarization India. Jungles. He and She.

21. Andrei Tavrov: Матрос на мачте (The Sailor on the Mast). In this novel, Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov meets a young woman who’s traveling around the Caucasus.

22. Margarita Khemlin: Дознаватель (The Investigator). Another one I read and enjoyed (previous post).

23. Vladimir Shapko: У подножия необъятного мира (At the Foot/Pedestal of an/the Immense World…). This work is called a poem but isn’t written as verse, though one observer who read the first installment in a journal says “poem” fits in the Greek sense because the book is an epic set in the Soviet era and looks at a huge number of characters who are regular people. Our observer sounded rather eager for a sense of what it might all mean…

24. *? Aleksandr Ebanoidze: Предчувствие октября (A Premonition of October). A novel about the Moscow intelligentsia during the transition years.

Disclosures: The usual, including my work translating various texts by Vodolazkin and Khemlin.

Up Next: Aleksandr Ilichevskii’s The Orphics, which still creeps me out; Iurii Buida’s Thief, Spy, and Murderer, which petered out; plus last month’s coven…

Image: Painting by Vasilii Surikov, via Wikipedia.

Dmitriev’s Peasant & Teenager Win Russian Booker

Another week, another big Russian literary prize... Today the Russian Booker went to Andrei Dmitriev for Крестьянин и тинейджер (The Peasant and the Teenager), a book I wrote about last month, here.

I’ve only read half this year’s finalists—Slavnikova’s book, Stepnova’s book, and Dmitriev’s winner—but have to say this choice surprised and disappointed me, and not just because Dmitriev already won a Yasnaya Polyana award in October. The Peasant and the Teenager is a decent enough novel about city and rural life, and I can understand enjoying it. Still, as I wrote in my previous post, I think the book lacks something. That something is, at least for me, intangible and difficult to describe: the book doesn’t manage to give me much new, either thematically or aesthetically, leaving me moderately satisfied but shruggingly indifferent. Despite the cow, my favorite character.

I’ll leave the commentary at that for now and add notes later if I find any interesting reactions. Two days later, these three articles seem to sum up what I've read:

Addition 1: An article from RIANovosti with comments about the award. (NB: They got Stepnova's first name wrong at the top: she's Marina!) I'm posting this because I agree with writer and critic Alisa Ganieva's comment that Dmitriev's book was a safe choice; Ganieva said she would have chosen a winner from the Stepnova, Slavnikova, or Terekhov books. This article also includes a comment from Booker committee chair Igor Shaitanov expressing his pleasure with the choice because the Booker's goal is to try to make serious Russian literature competitive; another article, on Gazeta.ru, has Shaitanov hinting that Dmitriev's book was noted by the prize's English partners and may be translated into English.

Addition 2: A thorough piece from Izvestia by critic Liza Novikova, who (as always!) fits a lot into a brief article. Among other things, Liza calls Dmitriev's novel a continuation of the Soviet-era "village prose" tradition, noting that Dmitriev manages to create a positive character in Paniukov, a rarity in contemporary literature. I agree and think it's one of the book's best aspects. Liza also includes some interesting quotes from finalists Slavnikova and Terekhov, with Slavnikova discussing how her book might have been different if written now and Terekhov saying that if readers see his Germans as social satire, then it must be social satire.

Addition 3: Anna Narinskaia's piece for Kommersant. Among other things, Narinskaia mentions the Booker's apparent trend of moderation (after those scandalous (!) Elizarov and Koliadina wins...), 2012 jury chair Samuil Lur'e's comment that Russian literature died back around, uhm, 1949 sending readers to foreign detective novels, and (writer and jury member) Roman Senchin's response that, essentially, all is not lost. Phew.

Up Next: Moscow trip report with more about the Big Book award, then Serhij Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad, and Margarita Khemlin’s Investigator. Then who knows… the bookshelf is wonderfully, ridiculously full after this fall’s Moscow trips! 

Booker of the Decade Goes to Chudakov

The winner of the Russian Booker of the Decade was announced today: Aleksandr Chudakov won, posthumously, for Ложится мгла на старые ступени... (beginning) (end) (A Gloom Is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps). Время/Vremia, a Russian publisher, wrote on Facebook today that they are preparing the book for publication. The novel was a Booker finalist in 2001.

Rather than attempting to summarize yet another book I haven’t read, I’ll just say that the beginning of the book has been translated, by Timothy D. Sergay, who received a PEN Translation Fund grant and a National Endowment for the Arts grant to support his work. Chapter 1 is available (here) on Words Without Borders and Chapter 2 is online (here) on the PEN American Center site.

It’s been quite a week (a good one!) so I haven’t had much time to look at reactions to the award but I’ll add some links and thoughts over the weekend.

Up next: American Literary Translator Association conference notes and (I think) the Andrei Bely prize winners.

The Russian Booker Lives

The Russian Booker Prize has a new general sponsor, Российская корпорация средств связи, known as Russian Telecom Equipment Company in English. RTEC has a history of supporting literary awards: it began sponsoring the Student Booker in 2010 and has been involved with that program for seven years, according to a news story on Lenta.ru. Lenta also reports that a five-year sponsorship contract with the Booker may be signed this summer.

No Booker will be awarded for 2011; books released this year may be submitted for the 2012 prize season. The Booker will, however, hold a special “Booker of the Decade” competition in 2011. All shortlisted books from 2001-2010 are eligible. Judges from past Booker seasons will choose five works each to develop a shortlist that will be announced in early November. The winner will be announced on December 1; the prize will be 600,000 rubles.

The Booker site has a summary of rules plus a list of all eligible Booker of the Decade books online here. There are lots of books on the list that I’d love to see get more (or less!) attention… and I’d be interested in hearing reader predictions.

For my part, I’m about to start reading Oleg Pavlov’s Казенная сказака (A Barracks Tale or Military Apologue), a 1995 Booker finalist and the first book of a trilogy that culminated in Карагандинские девятины, или Повесть последних дней (A Ninth-Day Wake/Party at Karaganda or A Story of Recent Days or Commemoration in Karaganda), which won the Booker in 2002. (Oy, there are multiple translated titles floating around for these books!) Readers on the lookout for English-language translations will be happy to know that A Barracks Tale is listed as winning a translation grant from Transcript, a program of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation; publisher is And Other Stories.

The Russian Booker Comes Full Circle

Yesterday was an interesting day for the Russian Booker Prize… The big news was the announcement that the Booker has no more money because its 10-year sponsorship contract with BP – yes, the BP more formally known as British Petroleum – has ended. The Booker people are looking for new financial backing. I wonder if they’re searching for another sponsor with the initials BP.

A few hours later I saw that last year’s Russia Booker winner, Elena Koliadina’s Цветочный крест (The Cross of Flowers) “won” the Полный абзац (Complete Abzats) antiprize. Abzats awards recognize “all the worst in literature” and are presented by the newspaper Книжное обозрение (Book Review) (previous post with Abzats description/definition). Among other things, the award announcement cited Koliadina’s attempt to simultaneously sit on three genre “chairs”: women’s, historical, and grotesque. AST, which published The Cross of Flowers in book form, noted that the award recognized the journal version of the novel, not the AST version. Heaven forbid! Of course that very same journal version won the Booker (previous post). Alas, the journal version of the book is no longer available online.

As someone who follows the Booker at a distance, I found the Abzats announcement about the Koliadina book more than a little amusing, an exclamation point of sorts on the Booker bankruptcy announcement. My head is feeling slow and addled by Sudafed so I’ll stop there before I turn this post into a complete abzats of a mess.

Up next: When my wits are back I’ll write about Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник (Letter-Book) and Elena Chizhova’s Полукровка (Half-Breed or Half-Blood). And then Margarita Khemlin’s most recent book.

2010 Russian Booker Awarded to Koliadina

The 2010 Russian Booker Prize was awarded to Elena Koliadina today for her novel Цветочный крест (The Cross of Flowers or The Flower Cross, take your pick), about a 17th-century man of the cloth, father Loggin.

The Lenta.ru news article announcing the award notes that The Cross of Flowers generated plentiful reader reaction. In summary: Lenta mentions negative reviews criticizing Koliadina’s stylized use of old Russian language, comical eroticism, lack of feel for language, and, to top it all off, “элементарное невежество,” “basic ignorance/lack of manners.” I guess nobody should be surprised about any of this since the line under the novel’s title reads “роман-катавасия” – “novel-muddle.”

The Lenta article quotes [indirectly] Koliadina as saying she’d always wanted to write a novel about love and sex but couldn’t find the right words in contemporary Russian. That, apparently, inspired her to seek shelter in pre-Petrine Russian. The key word in the first sentence, though, is афедрон/aphedron, which apparently hails from Greece. Афедрон isn’t in my Russian dictionaries, but the Internet tells me it can mean both latrine and anus in Russian… the specific meaning quickly becomes clear on the first page of the novel. So do the stylistic peculiarities of Koliadina’s writing.

The novel is currently only available in journal form; AST will release it as a book sometime around the new year holiday. For now, find The Cross of Flowers online at the Вологодская литература (Vologda Literature) site, here: beginning middle end.

P.S.

An English-language article about the award, from Voice of Russia, with a plot summary plus comments from Booker secretary Igor Shaitanov.

Further Russian-language commentary on the book:

-Snob.ru has a brief news item about the post-award scandal, followed by lots of very interesting comments. I particularly enjoyed reading critic Aleksandr Gavrilov's critique of the novel's stylistics; he essentially says it's sloppy and overloaded, which was my impression, too, from reading the first page and some random pages further in. (Gavrilov read the whole thing.) Snob's summary notes that one article about the award, from Kommersant, mentions that the Booker's five-year contract with its sponsor -- BP! -- is ending. Kommersant writer Anna Narinskaia wonders if the award was meant as a "жест" (gesture) indicating that the Booker organizers are tired of the award. Indeed.

-A piece by Artyom Efimov on Lenta.ru, discusses the post-award scandal and plays on Koliadina's use of the word "aphedron."

-The blogger who writes as zametilprosto seemed to root most for Petrosian to win the Booker but liked Cross second-best. Zametilprosto says the book is far more focused on holiness and sin than love and sex. A commenter agreed and calls the book easy but dull/boring (скучно) reading.

-Another news article. This one has quotes from Koliadina... including how her work for Космополитен got her going on the book.

-Critic Andrei Nemzer's absolutely scathing commentary on the award and the book.

Ilichevskii’s Matisse: Novel as Cut Out?

No, I haven’t changed my focus to art history… And Aleksandr Ilichevskii’s Booker-winning novel Матисс (Matisse) has little to do with Henri Matisse, at least at first glimpse. Describing Matisse is unusually challenging because it’s an ambitious, lumpy novel that uses complex, often poetic imagery and language to present social, existential, and metaphysical angles on post-Soviet Russia.

Ilichevskii focuses much of his attention on Leonid Korolev (korol’=king), an orphan who didn’t have a proper home until adulthood. He becomes a physicist: Korolev likes logic and hangs out at a linear accelerator. He was born in 1970, placing him in the generation that came of age during perestroika. He sees fear everywhere and has claustrophobia.

Matisse begins, however, by showing two Moscow homeless people, Vadya and Nadya. Ilichevskii ambles through a fair bit of biographical and geographical territory with them before we learn much about Korolev, who knows Vadya and Nadya because they sleep in the stairwell of his apartment building. Biography, Ilichevskii tells us, is a homeless person’s only property, and truth is a relative concept.

About halfway through Matisse, Korolev decides to free himself of his responsibilities, job, and boss, an old friend who’s also helped Korolev buy an apartment. Korolev tosses his keys in a river after preparing himself to live hungry and on the run as a hobo. A fair bit of philosophizing is behind Korolev’s decision, and it hardly seemed to matter whether it’s convincing or not: despite Matisse’s social content, with a focus on imagery and an almost cubist feel, Matisse is less a look in the mirror than a stylized impression of reality.

I think the best passages in Matisse take place underground, where Korolev really does become a king, wandering through subway tunnels and discovering hidden routes and stations. He loves the underground silence, piercing it by screaming when he enters new places. In one chilling scene, Korolev comes face to face with a passenger on a train; he also turns up civil defense sites and a model of the Kremlin.

Many elements in Matisse reminded me of other books. Vladimir Makanin’s Андеграунд (Underground) also focuses on an “intelligent” who lacks a permanent home or job. (This previous post shows other parallels, plus predecessors.) Makanin’s later Иsпуг (Fear), which I didn’t finish, covers similar territory and, like Matisse, includes an account of the October Events of 1993. The main characters in both Makanin books work as watchmen, as does Korolev for a short time.

I had high hopes for Matisse but found it difficult to enjoy because I didn’t think it quite jelled: Matisse contains many, many beautiful, touching, and metaphysically frightening passages, but Ilichevskii’s pace feels a bit too leisurely and his path too random as he describes the lives of Korolev, Vadya, and Nadya, who end up wandering together. Many episodes, especially Nadya’s love for the Moscow zoo and Korolev’s discoveries underground, are memorable, but Matisse’s chunks of reality and metaphor or allegory didn’t quite fit together for me, even if I regard the book – and the most colorful episodes in Korolev’s life – as a novel with a form that resembles Matisse’s cut out “The Snail.”

Level for non-native readers of English: Difficult language and syntax, with many dense passages, 4/5. I didn’t find the rewards of, say, Slavnikova’s 2017, which was as difficult to read as Matisse but presented a more compelling view of a world.

Up next: Dovlatov’s underwhelming Zone and Danzig Baldaev’s important Drawings from the Gulag. Then Voinovich’s Moscow 2042.

Representations of Reality: A Time of Women and The Yeltyshevs

How do you prefer your fictional reality? I’ve been thinking about writers’ methods for creating fictional realities after reading two 2009 Booker Prize finalists: Elena Chizhova’s Время женщин (A Time of Women), about women in a communal apartment in the early ‘60s raising a girl who doesn’t speak, and Roman Senchin’s Елтышевы (The Yeltyshevs), about a failing family that moves from city to village in the 21^st century.

Chizhova, who won the Booker for A Time of Women, uses chunks of first-person narration that jump from character to character, capturing verbal tics and grammar mistakes. Her characters’ dialogue, inner thoughts, and descriptions sometimes feel like a mush up of skaz technique and the “verbatim” method of using actual utterances in literary and cinematic texts. Chizhova was quoted in a New York Times article as saying she eavesdropped on her mother and great-grandmother as a child, making me wonder if their speech patterns inspired her use of the vernacular in A Time of Women.

Chizhova’s situations and characters – three old women with old-fashioned names, a young female factory worker dying of cancer, and the young woman’s co-workers – feel authentic, gritty, and very specific, though the novel’s language and structure is also so choppy and jumpy that it was difficult to engage with the book. At least I’m not alone: Anna Narinskaia’s review in Kommersant (here) mentions the relief of passages in which the young woman’s daughter tells of her life in more direct language. The reviewer also mentions the frequency of diminutive forms in the book. Yes, they become grating.

What frustrated me more about A Time of Women was that I felt I’d already covered so many of its themes with other writers: voices, the apartment question, the young woman’s hassles at work over her personal life and choices, the parallel of a rotten system and cancer, illegitimate children, memories of World War Two… I don’t mean to sound immune to the power of those important and very sad themes that examine totalitarianism and the Soviet past but they had an unfortunate recycled feel, despite the way Chizhova expresses them. It’s just not my book.

To be fair, I should add that I read A Time of Women from a printout I made from the literary journal Zvezda’s Web site; I don’t particularly like reading printouts. A Russian-language book (print run: 4,000) is evidently on the way but I have seen no mentions of an English-language translation.

Which brings me to Senchin. And television, the ultimate medium for pseudo-reality. (Disclosure: I don’t have a TV.) Both Chizhova and Senchin use televisions in their books: Chizhova’s young mother manages to buy one, and it becomes a view into other lives that look happy to the characters. In Senchin, TV reflects the Yeltyshevs’ degradation. Living in the village, the family’s humanness and their television, a connection to the rest of the world, die. The family sinks into alcoholism and violence, and the TV reception fades. When they lived in town, Mr. Yeltyshev was a cop, his wife was a librarian. He fails to keep the peace, and she doesn’t seem to read much. One son can’t hold down a job, the other is in jail. Ouch.

The reader knows from the start that Senchin’s characters are doomed: Mr. Yeltyshev loses his job at the drunk tank after a critical lapse of judgment, lending the book the feel of a dark, dark parable. Senchin’s matter-of-fact narrative voice drew me in from the first sentence, and his characters, locations, and situations are so vivid that I felt like I was on location with the narrator. Senchin doesn’t include extra details, and his mentions of changes of season reinforce the atmosphere and inevitability of the Yeltyshevs’ worsening situation. Yeltyshev himself, formerly part of the rotten system, becomes rottener. I felt queasy but I couldn’t stop reading. The Russian friend who bought the book for me in Moscow read it before handing it off: she couldn’t put it down, either.

Some critics grumbled when Senchin didn’t win the Booker – I also think it or Leonid Yuzefovich’s Cranes and Dwarfs (previous post) would have been a better choice than A Time for Women – but The Yeltyshevs has been criticized by some readers who think it’s too depressing. Yes, it’s chernukha, that dark naturalism I mentioned a few posts ago. Yes, it’s horribly depressing, particularly because the Yeltyshevs are always waiting for someone, something, anything miraculous to save them from themselves and their poor decisions. The Yeltyshevs is one of the saddest, darkest, and most achingly real books I’ve read in a long time. But for my taste, it’s also one of the best because it provides such a terrifying and detailed psychological portrait of intertwined economic, social, professional, and moral failures that could, with a few changes, easily take place in another family or another country. There’s lots more I’d love to write about both these books, but I’ll stop by saying that the universality of The Yeltyshevs is, for me, an important part of what realistic fiction should be.

Level for non-native readers of Russian: A Time of Women: 4/5, rather difficult, for its vernacular plus a twitchy narrative that can be difficult to follow. The Yeltyshevs: 2/5, moderately easy thanks to simple vocabulary and a smooth writing style that builds suspense despite an obvious outcome.

Prizes: Russian Booker Short List & Yasnaya Polyana Winners

The 2009 Russian Booker Prize short list is in! The finalists:

Elena Katishonok – Жили-были старик со старухой (Once There Lived an Old Man and His Wife) (excerpt)

Roman Senchin – Елтышевы (The Yeltyshevs) (beginning) (end)

Aleksandr Terekhov – Каменный мост (The Stone Bridge)

Boris Khazanov – Вчерашняя вечность (Yesterday’s Eternity)

Elena Chizhova – Время женщин (A Time of/for Women)

Leonid Iuzefovich – Журавли и карлики (beginning middle end) (Cranes and Dwarfs)

The most notable omissions from the short list are Andrei Gelasimov’s Степные боги (Steppe Gods) (previous post), which already won the 2009 National Bestseller, and Vladimir Makanin’s Асан (Asan) (previous post), the 2008 Big Book winner.

Openspace.ru has additional background here. Among the information: all the books have history themes and one judge says he had 11 names on this preliminary “short” list but the award’s rules stipulate that “short” means six. The winner of the 500,000 tax-free ruble prize will be announced on December 3, 2009.

Yasnaya Polyana award winners were announced on Monday, and they have a distinct northern feel. Vladimir Lichutin won the “Contemporary Classic” award. I wasn’t familiar with him until Monday… but quickly learned that his historical trilogy Раскол (The Schism) has received a lot of praise. One example: Vladimir Bondarenko’s list of 50 of the best twentieth-century Russian books includes The Schism. Bondarenko’s description mentions northern mysticism and calls the book a combination of fact, myth, legend, and мистерия, a Russian word that can refer to either secret rituals (usually pagan, I believe) or medieval religious drama… I think we call the latter miracle-play.

(A brief aside: Thank you to Languagehat for sending me the link to the Bondarenko list – it includes a lot of interesting picks. Some, like Master and Margarita and The Petty Demon, are old favorites, but others have stood on my shelves, unread, for too long. Those include Fadeev’s Разгром (The Rout) and Aleksei Tolstoy’s Петр Первый (Peter the Great).)

Yasnaya Polyana’s “21^st century. Outstanding Work of Contemporary Prose” award went to Vasilii Golovanov for Остров, или Оправдание бессмысленных путешествий (The Island or Justification of Pointless Journeys), a nonfiction book that is evidently difficult to describe… terms like essay, philosophy, and exploration all pop up. Even a quick glance at the first page seems to confirm all those, as Golovanov mentions tundra and a chilly hotel room in Naryan-Mar.

This Российская газета article has more on the Yasnaya Polyana awards.

2009 Russian Booker Prize Long List

With the first of July comes the first Russian Booker Prize list of the year, a long list of 24 entries chosen from a field of 82 nominees. This year’s long listers include:

Two books that have already won major prizes:

Andrei Gelasimov’s 2009 National Bestseller winner Степные боги (Steppe Gods) (previous post)

Vladimir Makanin’s 2008 Big Book winner Асан (Asan) (previous post)

Books that made the short list of the 2009 Big Book prize:

Andrei Volos – Победитель (The Victor)

Maria Galina – Малая Глуша (Small Glusha)

Leonid Zorin – Скверный глобус (The Wretched Globe)

Aleksandr Terekhov – Каменный мост (The Stone Bridge)

Boris Khazanov – Вчерашняя вечность (Yesterday’s Eternity)

Leonid Iuzefovich – Журавли и карлики (beginning middle end) (Cranes and Dwarfs)

Other familiar names:

Iurii Arabov – Чудо (The Miracle) (a Big Book long lister that I couldn’t get into; comments here)

Andrei Bitov – Преподаватель симметрии (The Symmetry Teacher)

Roman Senchin – Елтышевы (The Yeltyshevs) (beginning) (end)

Aleksandr Snegirev – Нефтяная Венера (Oil [as in petroleum] Venus), a 2009 Natsbest short lister

The full long list is available here on the Booker site. The Booker people will announce the short list on October 7 and the winner on December 3. The winner will receive 500,000 rubles, and each finalist will receive 50,000 rubles.

Aleshkovskii’s “Fish”: The Big Novel that Got Away

That’s it: I’ll limit myself to just one fish pun for this post. But I can’t help myself for calling Petr Aleshkovskii’s (Peter Aleshkovsky) Рыба. История одной миграции (Fish. The Story of One Migration) a big novel that got away.

Fish begins in Tadzhikistan, where a teenage girl named Vera (Faith) lives with her Russian parents. Vera works one summer on an archeological dig, where she helps reconstruct, like a puzzle (пазл=pazl!), a fresco with a fish. Later that summer, Vera’s personal horseman of the apocalypse arrives: an Uzbek on a black horse who rapes her after drugging her with a nasty drink he’s brewed.

The trauma affects Vera, directly and indirectly, for the rest of the book. She becomes a nurse with somewhat mystically therapeutic hands and takes care of others, including her husband, a former patient, who, medically unable to work as a policeman, takes a job at a slaughterhouse and becomes an alcoholic. He’s the one who begins calling Vera a cold fish. Through the course of the book, Vera’s migrations take her to Dushanbe for education, a border town in Russia to escape war, the country for quiet after a son overdoses and her husband becomes a monk, and, finally, Moscow for a live-in nursing job. When the book ends, Vera is about to move to Italy to become a nanny.

All of which means that Fish, which was short-listed for the 2006 Russian Booker Prize, contains plenty of great material about life in Central Asia, the stresses of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and personal trauma. Unfortunately, though, Fish plods its way through geographical and emotional territory, squandering opportunities to expand the book beyond an accounting of sites seen and indignities experienced.

A few very vivid scenes stand out – a voyeuristic, sensual passage in a Tadzhik garden and Vera’s walk in the woods are particularly good – but other portions of the book are woefully underdeveloped. I kept waiting for details about Vera’s family’s fish-based business in the border town, after they’ve migrated to Russia, but nothing ever came. Aleshkovskii’s strength is in writing about nature – the beautiful chapters in the woods in Жизнеописание хорька (mistranslated as Skunk: A Life) made that book well worth reading – so expanding the fish theme seemed natural.

I think a big part of the problem in Fish is the first-person narrative. I don’t believe Aleshkovskii fails in writing from a woman’s perspective, but I think a third-person narrative would have enabled far broader and more nuanced observations of Vera’s experiences. There are tremendous inherent difficulties with narrating a book from the point of view of a person who’s so emotionally spent.

Vera fills her days and nights with extra work, much of it menial, as if she is carrying a saintly burden. She rarely reflects on her past… until the very last page, when she starts thinking back on the people and events in her life, and feels her “я” (“I”) separate from her body as she did when she was raped. This time, though, she calls the experience спасение (salvation) and, remembering the advice of an elderly Estonian man who rescued her after a failed pilgrimage of sorts, she realizes she needs to радоваться (be glad, feel joy). All the pieces of her life, like the puzzle of the fish fresco, seem to come together.

One interesting aspect of this rushed ending is that it occurs in a Moscow apartment at Metro “Беговая” (“Begovaia”), named for the nearby hippodrome. The root of Begovaia, beg, means run(ning). The name neatly brings back the horse theme and, perhaps, Vera’s move away from Begovaia will finally signify the end of her numbness and escape from her self. Numbness is an important theme: others in Fish anesthetize themselves with alcohol and drugs, and some do not survive.

Unfortunately, I can’t argue too much with a Russian friend who thinks Aleshkovskii is just plain boring. I can’t say Fish was just plain boring, and I wanted very much to like it, but it wasn’t always very compelling, despite the cultural, religious, and current history motifs that Aleshkovskii wove in. With more detail and depth, Fish could have become a very significant book about social and personal changes, but instead it feels like an uneven draft, a big novel that slithered away.

Image: Auroqueiro, via sxc.hu

Elizarov Wins 2008 Russian Booker

Mikhail Elizarov won the 2008 Russian Booker Prize for his novel Библиотекарь (The Librarian). Other finalists were Il'ia Boiashov, Vladimir Sharov, Galina Shchekina, German Sadulaev, and Elena Nekrasova. 

This post from October 2, 2008, lists finalists, with brief summaries of their books. 

For more information (in Russian) on this year's prize, see this article on Lenta.ru. 

P.S. Apologies to subscribers who may have received this post twice!