Favorite Russian Writers from A to Я: Х Marks the Spot

It’s been years, literally years, since I’ve written an alphabet post: I left off with the titanic letter T in July 2014. And then I struggled with the letter У/U, just as I had struggled with O earlier, because I simply didn’t have enough favorite authors to compile a post. I decided to skip a few letters after one of you asked me last week when there would be another alphabet post: since I’d already skipped O (and something else, too, I think…), I decided not to bother with У/U or Ф/F, either, at least for the time being. Hence we’ve arrived at Х, the letter often represented in English as Kh.

And what a productive letter Х/Kh is! My first Kh author to mention is Mikhail Kheraskov, an eighteenth-century writer I studied in grad school. It wasn’t Kheraskov’s Rossiad—a classic epic poem that was/is evidently in school curricula—that drew me, though, but his plays, which Wikipedia rightfully says have been “neglected by posterity.” Kheraskov’s Гонимыя (in the old orthography; I called it The Persecuted in English) was not only the reason I learned how to use a microfiche machine: it was also a good lesson about the literary transition from sentimentalism to classicism. And literary influences. Kheraskov contributed to my love of sentimentalism—The Persecuted’s title pages call it a “teary drama”—and it was his work that got me interested in analyzing literary genres. That’s more than enough to make him a favorite.

One of my favorite contemporary authors, Margarita Khemlin, who died a very young death in autumn 2015, is the first writer whose work I loved so much I had to translate it. I’ve enjoyed her long and short stories, and her novels, too, and am very happy I’ll be starting work on her Klotsvog (previous post), for the Russian Library at Columbia University Press, in June. I’ve always admired Margarita’s ability to write about the damage of World War 2 and Jewish heritage with humor, grit, and grace. And I can’t wait to create an English-language voice for Maya, the narrator (and title character) of Klotsvog, my favorite of Margarita’s novels. (Favorite that I’ve read at this writing, anyway: a new one was recently published posthumously.) I missed her terribly when I was in Moscow last fall and think about her constantly: her trust in me years ago means a lot to me as a person and as a translator. And I always loved her sense of humor as a person. (Her husband and sister both took to calling me Becky Thatcher, too.) Melanie Moore translated The Investigator (Дознаватель), which earned excellent reviews and was published by Glagoslav.

Khlebnikov's grave, Moscow, November 2012, my fuzzy photo

And then there are three that I always enjoy reading but don’t have such personal feelings for… There’s the wonderful Daniil Kharms, whom I took a liking to in the early 2000s after reading Старуха (The Old Woman): Kharms is always good for some absurdity: I bought a compact 1991 edition with prose, poetry, drama, letters, and art when I lived in Moscow and enjoy picking it up every now and then for a little weirdness. Kharms has grown on me over the years, like a cucumber. There’s lots of Kharms available in translation, including Matvei Yankelevich’s Today I Wrote Nothing, from Overlook Press (2009), and Alex Cigale’s Russian Absurd, from Northwestern University Press (2017). That “three” includes two poets: Vladimir Khodasevich and Velimir Khlebnikov, neither of whom I have read methodically or even broadly but both of whom I love reading when references or mentions pop up. I’ve always had a thing for futurism so enjoy Khlebnikov for that. And, of course, for his “Incantation by Laughter,” which is mentioned in this fun post (and my comments) about Khlebnikov on Wuthering Expectations. I’ve read less of Khodasevich but he keeps turning up, both at translator conferences (represented by his translators, of course!) and in quotations in fiction. Since I’m utterly inept at writing about poetry, I’ll leave this one to Wuthering Expectations, too, since there’s this post about Selected Poems, which contains Peter Daniels’s beautiful translations. Here’s a sample of Peter’s work, from theguardian.com’s “Poem of the Week” feature. Peter’s collection, by the way, was published by Angel Classics in the UK and Overlook in the US.

Х is an unusual letter for me because nearly all the Kh authors on my shelf are favorites. The only writer left unread is Boris Khazanov: I have a collection that a friend borrowed and enjoyed very much.

Up Next: An Afanasy Mamedov novella set in Baku. Kir Bulychev’s Поселок (known in English as Those Who Survive): I read very little science fiction (I’ve failed on nearly every attempt at reading the Strugatsky Brothers) but enjoy it when I find something that suits my taste. This Bulychev book feels like a perfect fit for a very frenetic time. I’ll also be doing some preparatory reading before participating in Russian Literature Week events in early May. And I’m still plugging away with Crime and Punishment, though may switch to Oliver Ready’s translation of the novel, which I enjoy reading much more than Dostoevsky’s original, which I’ve been rereading as a remedial measure and as a prelude to reading Robert Belknap’s Plots, which discusses C&P as well as King Lear…

Disclaimers: The usual, including knowing the translators mentioned in this post.

Book Review Odds & Ends: Volkov, Kharms, et al.

1. You won’t need a deep interest in Daniil Kharms to enjoy a recent London Review of Books article on Matvei Yankelevich’s book of translations, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. Reviewer Tony Wood provides plenty of background on Kharms’s behavioral and literary eccentricities before commenting on Yankelevich’s translations.

One of my previous postings about Kharms includes links to Russian and English versions of his work.

2. Meanwhile, in The New York Times Book Review, Keith Gessen reviews Solomon Volkov’s The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn. Books whose titles promise so much are often a disappointment – War and Peace notwithstanding – and Gessen doesn’t sound thrilled with Volkov’s efforts, despite the book’s seeming completeness and descriptiveness.

Gessen places Volkov’s book in context by questioning the title, reminding readers that 20^th-century Russian cultural history hardly feels magical, thanks to what he calls a “string of exiles, suicides, torture sessions and murders.” Gessen also mentions the tendency for members of Joseph Brodsky’s generation to retreat into the private life they craved during the Soviet period, rendering them “powerless to stop Putin from terrorizing their country.” This is true: I know one person who thinks of himself as being in a sort of personal exile.

3. Finally, recent daily issues of the New York Times have included two other Russia-related reviews: Bill Keller’s take on Timothy J. Colton’s Yeltsin: A Life and Janet Maslin’s unecstatic views of Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44.

"Soviet Deadpan" and Absurdity

As a self-taught observer of the absurd – my training comes from trips to the DMV, trying to converse with Russian bureaucrats, and reading about politics – it feels strange to read analysis of Daniil Kharms’s absurdist writing. Deciding what, exactly, made Kharms “weird” or absurdist feels like an inherently absurd act.

That’s not to say that “Soviet Deadpan,” George Sauders’s essay about Daniil Kharms in today’s “New York Times Book Review,” isn’t worth reading. It is! Saunders appreciates the energy and paradox of Kharms’s stories, and touches on the borders between Kharms’s narratives and what he calls “traditional stories.”

Russian literature has a long tradition of absurdity. One classic 19^th century example is Nikolai Gogol’s “Нос” (“The Nose”), the tale of a man who wakes up without his nose, only to find the nose on the street, now man-sized, dressed in a nice uniform, and exiting a carriage. Gary Saul Morson’s article “’Absolute nonsense’ – Gogol’s Tales” from The New Criterion provides a wonderfully readable introduction to Gogol’s world.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s Собачье сердце (Heart of a Dog) is another favorite that combines absurdity with fantasy as it shows, among other things, what happens when a man’s organs are transplanted into a stray dog. (For one thing, he becomes head of cat control…)

Sergei Dovlatov takes a very different angle on absurdity in Soviet life and journalism in the book I’m reading now, Компромисс (The Compromise). So far The Compromise is nominally realistic – none of Bulgakov’s talking animals or Gogol’s walking body parts – as it addresses the meaning of truth in the USSR. I’m not worried if using “realistic” to describe absurdity sounds paradoxical: that’s what absurdity is all about.

An earlier Lizok's Bookshelf piece on Kharms: “The Charms of Kharms”

Edit, 13 December: For more on Kharms, check out "It's Kharms week, here" on Languor Management, a blog that also includes author Kevin Kinsella's poetry translations.

Mentioned in this posting:
Daniil Kharms book on Amazon
Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog on Amazon
Dovlatov's The Compromise

The Charms of Kharms

Daniil Kharms is back, just in time for this year's Russian elections! Natal’ia Mitroshina’s Падение в небеса (Falling into the Heavens), based on Kharms’s diary and cycle of stories, Случаи (Incidences), is a featured film at this fall's 2morrow/завтра film festival in Moscow.

Kharms is tremendously popular in Russia, at least among my friends, but it took me years to appreciate his absurd stories and poems. By the time I understood, from personal experience, what my friends meant when they said that living in Russia meant always having to prove that you’re not a camel, I was ready for Kharms. Maybe it’s time to try Waiting for Godot again, too.

Kharms may be an acquired taste, at least for some of us, but he does have his charms, particularly for students of Russian. His writing is often simple and repetitive, with fairly easy vocabulary. And the element of absurdity builds a skill that’s often overlooked: confidence in your reading comprehension skills. Can blows to the head with a cucumber really kill? In this world, yes.

I like to page through my Kharms book and read random pieces. My favorite so far has been his longest story, “Старуха” (“The Old Woman”). Here’s what I wrote about it for a Soviet literature workshop last year:

“The Old Woman” is one of Daniil Kharms’s longest works but, at 20+ pages, still quite short. Kharms is known and much loved in Russia for his avant-garde, absurd, and very short stories, many of which are difficult for us to relate to. “The Old Woman” combines, among other elements, black humor, a Stalin-era feeling of desperation about life (Kharms was arrested more than once), the St. Petersburg tradition of fantastically strange events. Absurd stories don’t often appeal to me, but I found this one oddly compelling. There is a dual-language version available on Amazon.com; much of the language in the Russian original is quite simple. Kharms: The Old Woman (Bristol Russian Texts Series) (Bristol Russian Texts Series)

-For more Kharmsian absurdity, try these translated stories in a recent issue of The New Yorker.

-On a non-Kharms note, if you’re interested in the connection between camels and absurdity, you might enjoy Jerzy Stuhr’s “The Big Animal,” summarized nicely in this review. I loved this movie.