2018 Big Book Award Winners

The Big Book Award announced this year’s winners yesterday evening. The point totals from the jury’s voting were almost shockingly close. Here are some rather rambling (I’m a little distracted as I get ready for a Slavist convention!) thoughts on the winners.

The jury’s top prize (493 points) went to Maria Stepanova for Памяти памяти (In Memory of Memory or Post-Memory). I seem to recall admitting to a certain trepidation about reading this book, largely thanks to hearing colleagues’ strong opinions: some loved it (the pedestal factor for books deemed “very important” can be difficult to surmount) but others hated it and claimed their eyes glazed over (I was also warned, as if to doom, that there was no plot… and I do love plot). I read a decent chunk and suppose it’s most accurate to say I fall somewhere in the middle, admiring the quality of the writing but not always fully appreciating the detail and density of what Stepanova writes. Despite that downside – and please note that I wrote “not always fully” – I found something very comforting about the pages that I read, both because of the very fact that Stepanova writes about memory, history, and family, things that are, indeed very important, and because she writes about them in a way that’s both elevated and very engaging. I ended up ranking it in my top clump of books. I plan to read more, very slowly – although sometimes the book feels almost addictively readable, it’s better to read in very small doses, to absorb, even try on, levels of meaning and significance. Post-Memory is painfully difficult to describe – I appreciated a tweet calling it a “meta-novel” – so I’ll leave you with Suhrkamp’s summary and a link to Cynthia Haven’s interview with Stepanova for Los Angeles Review of Books. As well as congratulations to Maria Stepanova and a note saying the book is on the way in English, published by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and New Directions in the US; I’ll see if I can find out who’s translating. Edit: Translator friend and colleague Ian Dreiblatt reports that Sasha Dugdale, who has translated some of Stepanova’s poetry, is translating.

In my biggest personal surprise of the ceremony, Alexander Arkhangelsky won second prize (486 points) for Бюро проверки (Verification Bureau or something of the sort), a novel set in 1980 Moscow (think: Olympics), a time that certainly interests me, though Arkhangelsky’s meandering, slow-burn narrative fizzled, failing to fire my imagination. (Sorry but it’s wood-burning season.) I’d like to say that’s despite Arkhangelsky’s vivid description of Moscow life at the time but I’m afraid it’s because of it: any sense of plot or forward motion gets lost in details, details, details and so much atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere (not to mention an irritating girlfriend who’s not irritating in a good “unlikeable character” way) that I stopped reading at about 75 percent (reading that far was thanks to inertia and misplaced optimism that the book would improve), after nearly drowning in familiar reminiscences that felt more unsatisfying than leftover champagne – structure (or even anti-structure, depending on the book) is as important to a novel as bubbles are to champagne. As so often happens, Konstantin Milchin’s review for Izvestia discusses many of the problems I found with the book.

Dmitry Bykov took third prize (473 points) with his Июнь (June), a novel composed of three very loosely connected stories (long, medium, and shorter). The first piece in June was, by far, my favorite reading on the entire Big Book list: it often felt jarring, disturbing, and uncomfortable to read this novella about war-era sexual misconduct (I’ve purposely chosen a broad term here) during our #Metoo times, particularly since I was reading June during the Kavanaugh hearings. Bykov’s primary characters felt almost universally unappealing to me and the love (?) triangle he draws feels both schematic and real but this long story moves along at a quick clip, with a fair bit of psychological suspense. Alas, I found the second piece dully typical and nothing grabbed me about the third, either, though I may attempt them again later, though that would already be a third or fourth try. No matter, part one of June was good enough reading to land this book in my top picks.

People’s choice voters awarded first prize to Dmitry Bykov’s June; no surprise there. Same for second prize going to Andrei Filimonov’s Рецепты сотворения мира (World Creation Recipes), an often humorous novel that describes family history and is so short that finishing it took minimal effort, even though the novel petered out toward the end and concluded with what felt more like vignettes about Soviet life than episodes in a novel. That may have been the point but, for me, anyway, it didn’t make for especially good fiction. Finally, Oleg Yermakov’s Радуга и Вереск (the one with the difficult title that’s probably not really Rainbow and Heather in English) won third prize. The Yermakov book started off okay enough (despite far too many mentions of Richard Ashcroft and The Verve), with a wedding photographer going on a reconnaissance trip to Smolensk. Mysterious things happen that send the reader back a couple centuries but I grew impatient in the past because of a mishmash of languages that felt rather overdone (so many footnotes!), history, and a lack of steady plot drive. Since this book is so long (736 pages), my “quickly” is relative – I skipped and skimmed my way through several hundred pages before giving up, despite understanding the book’s homey appeal for many readers.

This year’s Big Book finalists were the weakest bunch I’ve seen since I joined the Literary Academy (the award’s jury) several years ago. Is this a statement on the state of current fiction? Did some good books go unnominated? Answers: I’m not sure and I don’t know. Beyond Post-Memory and June, there was only one other book that I thought was at all prize-worthy: Olga Slavnikova’s Прыжок в длину (Long Jump) is well-constructed, though, for my taste, it’s overly burdened with metaphors (some of which feel pretty forced) and detail, which means that I’ll confess to not finishing that one, either, despite appreciating Slavnikova’s discipline in creating such a consistent and well-imagined set of contemporary characters and circumstances, qualities that landed the book in my top clump.

In other news, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, an author well-known in English translation, won a special award for her contributions to literature. And I’m excited that Big Book began recognizing literary bloggers this year: Yevgenia Lisitsyna, who writes as @greenlampbooks on Telegram, is the winner. I’d love to read her work but oh my, am I ready for another platform?! I may just have to try.

Up Next: Eduard Verkin’s Sakhalin Island, Alisa Ganieva’s Offended Sensibilities, the ASEEES (Slavist!) conferenceconvention I’m about to go to (hence my addled post, hope it makes sense!), and who knows what else.

Disclaimers: The usual. I received Big Book finalist books in electronic form, though colleagues gave me a couple in hard copy at various times, for various reasons.

2018’s Big Book Finalists: Eight Books Sized Up for Summer Reading

The Big Book Award announced its eight-book shortlist back on Wednesday and I still haven’t quite figured out what I think of it other than that I’m grateful not to see any megabiographies. On the one hand, I’m glad that there are two women on the list after last year’s list included zero. On the other hand, I’d have loved to have seen a few more unfamiliar names—and more women—on the list. On some happy third hand that I often wish I had, I thank the committee for naming a shortlist that’s close to genuinely short and is (blogger bonus!) composed of fairly translatable titles.

Here’s the list, in Russian alphabetical order by author surname:

Alexander Arkhangel’sky’s Бюро проверки (Verification Bureau or something of the sort) is set in 1980 Moscow (think: Olympics) and depicts how the main character is “tested” for stability (think: Cold War). Recommended by a friend. Easily beachable at 416 pages with a mass of 384 grams.

Dmitry Bykov’s Июнь (June) is set during 1939-1941 and brings together three characters and their stories (which apparently cover three genres) making the book sound relatively economical at 512 pages and 572 grams. Recommended by a different friend.

Alexei Vinokurov’s Люди черного дракона (People of the Black Dragon) is set along the Amur River (apparently known in Chinese as Black Dragon) around the time of the 1917 revolution. I’d never heard of Vinokurov so this is a mystery book for me. It’s also very nimble at 288 pages with a mass of 366 grams.

Yevgeny Grishkovets’s Театр отчаяния. Отчаянный театр (Theater of Despair. Desperate Theater, I guess) is labeled as a “memoiristic novel.” The book came out very recently and the descriptions are brief, though the book itself is anything but brief at 912 pages. And at 1320 grams (including packaging) it’s certainly not light reading.

Oleg Yermakov’s Радуга и Вереск (Rainbow and Heather, though is this literal?…) is big, too, at 736 pages (massing out at relatively compact 564 grams) and it sounds like it also blends multiple stories, one set in the seventeenth century, the other in 2015. Lots of friends have recommended Yermakov to me over the years so I’m eager to try this one.

Olga Slavnikova’s Прыжок в длину (Long Jump) concerns a young athlete who loses his lower extremities when he leaps to save a boy from being hit by a car. Though interesting for its portrayal of the long-term aftermath of the accident (the characters aren’t especially sympathetic and there’s a lot of social commentary), I felt bogged down by metaphors and similes around page 150 and put the book on hold. At 512 pages and 460 grams, though, it’s relatively manageable compared to some of these other finalists, plus I am pretty curious about what happens. Also recommended by friends.

Maria Stepanova’s Памяти памяти (I’ll call it In Memory of Memory, as this LARB interview does) is probably the book I’ve heard the most about, meaning that it also comes recommended, as a book about cultural history, family history, and, yes, memory. This sounds like such a thoughtful book that it feels thoroughly uncouth to give its bare statistics: 408 pages, 546 grams.

Andrei Filimonov’s Рецепты сотворения мира (Recipes for the Creation of the World) is so nicely summarized in Galina Yuzefovich’s review for Meduza, translated by Hilah Kohen, that I’ll leave the description to them. I will add, though, that the book’s cover says “От Парижа до Сибири через весь ХХ век” (“From Paris to Siberia, through the entire twentieth century”), putting me in awe of Filimonov for limiting himself to a very efficient 320 pages that mass in at 375 grams.

Yes, this polleny past week made me a little silly…

Disclaimers and Disclosures: Not much other than the usual and that the Slavnikova book was given to me by the organizers of the Russia stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair, thank you!

Up Next: More from the heavy “write about” shelf: a short story roundup, Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M. (I’m already waiting for the sequel!), and Vladimir Sharov’s The Rehearsals in Oliver Ready’s translation. And then there’s a Vladimir Makanin novella… and whatever I start tonight.

Trip Report: Peaks Island. In Praise of Close-to-Home Travel. A List of Russia’s Open Book Books.

I generally only write reports about big trips with overnight stays—New York for BookExpo America, other American cities for American Literary Translators Association conferences, Moscow for translator congresses…—but a recent three-hour trip to Peaks Island, where I helped host a screening of the documentary Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin at the Peaks Island branch of the Portland Public Library, made for an enjoyable evening. It also brought some realizations about how important it is to get out and tell the public about Russian literature and literary translation.

First, a bit of background, presented rather inelegantly, to save space… “Russia Resurgent” was the topic for this year’s Camden Conference, fwhich is held annually in Camden, Maine, a couple hours up the coast from where I live. Though a three-day conference in Camden is the centerpiece, there’s also a huge multi-month schedule of community events around the state. I was involved with three: I read excerpts from some of my translations at libraries in Scarborough and Kennebunk (a third event, in Brunswick, was cancelled because of bad weather), and helped host a screening of Russia’s Open Book at the Scarborough Public Library, attended by the film’s co-directors, Sarah Willis and Paul Mitchell. Though the Peaks Island trip wasn’t part of the Camden Conference schedule, it came out of the Scarborough screening.

Every event was fun. I love reading from my translations—these readings included excerpts from works by Margarita Khemlin, Vladislav Otroshenko, Eugene Vodolazkin, and Marina Stepnova—and the audiences in Scarborough and Kennebunk were wonderful. People asked questions about everything from how I got started in translation to how I work and how I know my translations are correct. It’s a big plus that public readings can be a great way to gauge your success in conveying humor. And people ask where and how they can find and buy the translated books.

The two screenings of Russia’s Open Book took a little less energy—reading for an hour is tiring even when Q&A is interspersed!—but were at least as rewarding. People engage well with the film’s excerpts from four novels, which are read by Stephen Fry and accompanied by animation. There’s context-setting talk with Russian critics. The ending, with Vladimir Sorokin’s comments about the future, chills my spine (and yes, I mean that literally) every time, even though I know what’s coming. And an hour is perfect to present detail about six writers without putting anyone to sleep. Lots of questions come up: do Russian writers often create parallel universes, do these writers make a living from their fiction, what’s the situation for Russian bookstores. And people ask where and how they can find and buy the translated books.

The audience at the Peaks Island screening even asked if I could create a list of books in English translation by the six writers in Russia’s Open Book. I can. And it’s below. I didn’t see much of Peaks Island during the three hours I was there (particularly since it was dark when I left) but I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the couple dozen people who came to the library on a cold and very windy night. Meeting them—and the people who came to my events in Scarborough and Kennebunk—feels like a perfect antidote to complaints that translators (and even translated literature) are invisible and go unrecognized. People do care about translation, readers are interested in Russian fiction in translation, and I’m glad so many translators make the effort to read from and speak about their work in their communities. The more I get out, the more I realize how important that is.

Without further ado, here’s the list I promised to the Peaks Island audience. Perhaps it will be helpful to other libraries and institutions that screen the film. And please do let me know if I missed anything! Two notes. First, five of the six writers in the film have books available in English translation; Mariam Petrosyan is the exception. Second, I’ve linked each writer’s name to the bios I wrote for the Read Russia site, in preparation for BookExpo America 2012. The publication and awards lists there aren’t all up-to-date, but the bios still provide a fair bit of background on the writers as well as lists of some of the writers’ short fiction available in translation. And a third note: my “previous post” posts are written about the Russian originals, not the translations.

Zakhar Prilepin 

• Sankya (Disquiet International/Dzanc Books, 2014, tr. Mariya Gusev and Jeff Parker with Alina Ryabovolova. This book makes great use of glossaries.) (previous post)
• Sin (Glagoslav, 2012, tr. Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas) (previous post)

Ludmila Ulitskaya 

• The Big Green Tent (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, tr. Bela Shayevich)
• Daniel Stein, Interpreter (The Overlook Press, 2011, tr. Arch Tait) (previous post)
• Sonechka (Schocken, 2005, tr. Arch Tait), novella and stories
• Medea and Her Children (Schocken, 2002, tr. Arch Tait)
• The Funeral Party: A Novel (Schocken, 2001, tr. Cathy Porter, edited by Arch Tait)

Dmitry Bykov

• Living Souls (Alma Books, 2011, tr. Cathy Porter) (previous post)

Anna Starobinets

• Catlantis (Pushkin Children’s Books, fall 2015, tr. Jane Bugaeva). Cat humor, romance, and adventure for children nine and up, plus cat lovers of all ages… more soon on Catlantis.
• The Icarus Gland (Skyscraper Publications, 2014, tr. James Rann). Short stories.
• The Living (Hesperus, 2012, tr. James Rann)
• An Awkward Age (Hesperus, 2011, tr. Hugh Aplin). Short fiction. (previous post)

Vladimir Sorokin

• The Blizzard (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, late 2015, tr. Jamey Gambrell), (previous post)
• Day of the Oprichnik (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, tr. Jamey Gambrell) (previous post). My favorite Sorokin book.
• The Ice Trilogy (New York Review Books, 2011, tr. Jamey Gambrell) (previous posts: first book and second book)
• The Queue (New York Review Books, 2008, tr. Sally Laird, first published in English in 1988 by Readers International Inc.). I’ve heard lots of great things about this book over the years… I’ve been saving The Queue for a cranky day!

You can screen Russia's Open Book, too, here or through Intelligent Channel's YouTube channel.

Disclaimers and disclosures: The usual and much more, for my work with Read Russia, talks with Sarah and Paul about the film…

Up next: Eugene Vodolzakin’s Solovyov and Larionov and Lena Eltang’s Cartagena, a complex murder mystery of sorts that I’m still reading slowly to appreciate all the details. Plus maybe a novella or two… Also, translators and publishers, please do send me titles and dates for this year’s releases: I’m hoping to post the 2015 translation list soon!

Photo: Econrad, creative commons, via Wikipedia

Guest Post by Olga Bukhina: Having It Both Ways

I was very happy when translator and writer Olga Bukhina sent me a note last month asking if I’d like her to write another guest post about Russian literature for children. I was happy to say Yes: some of you told me you enjoyed her previous guest post, plus I’d been so busy teaching and working on preparations for Read Russia that I was getting behind in my own reading and writing. Of course, Olga’s topic sounded great, too—writers who write for adults and kids—and two of the writers she mentions in her post were in New York last week for BookExpo America and Read Russia events. I’m grateful to Olga for writing this post (even more so because I came home exhausted and with a bad cold)… and for being such a good friend and colleague last week in New York!

Many contemporary writers who write primarily for adults have tried their hands at writing for children, or perhaps it’s better to say that they’ve experimented with writing books that can be read both by adults and by kids. As Dmitry Bykov eloquently put it in the subtitle to one of his books, “A Children’s Book for Adults, or An Adults’ Book for Children.”

Lyudmila Ulitskaya has published a lot of short stories about children, such as her series Девочки (Girls), but her Истории про зверей и людей (Stories of Animals and People) are for kids. The book starts with three tales with very long descriptive names. История про воробья Антверпена, кота Михеева, столетника Васю и сороконожку Марью Семеновну с семьей (A Story of Antwerp the Sparrow, Mikheev the Cat, Vasya the Aloe Plant, and Maria Semenovna the Centipede and Her Family) is about three creatures who first get together out of loneliness. They stay together for the sake of helping a muddle-headed mother centipede to raise her enormous family. These little tales are funny and to the point, and have just exactly the right proportion of light humor and moral message. Yes, it is good to love everyone, including “those who do not look like you, for example, sparrows, cats, and aloe plants.” The tales are followed by a collection of very short stories, Детство-49 (Childhood-49), published before as a separate book. These are more realistic vignettes of post-World War II Soviet childhood, and the reader clearly sees the events through the child-protagonist’s eyes and senses the child’s biggest fear or strongest desire.

Bykov’s О зверьках и зверушах (About Critters and Creatures), whose subtitle I already mentioned above, is sometimes published as a part of a larger book В мире животиков (In the World of Animalitos). He co-authored these tales with his wife Irina Luk’ianova. They are tiny stories about various animal-like creatures who live in different towns, Гордый (Proud-Town) and Преображенск (Transfiguration-City). They are female and male, and behave just like people in spite of their tassel tails. Some of them are very good, others are very bad, and still others are somewhere in between. There is a lot of contemporary politics, eternal religious debate, Christian allusions, parodies of Russian intelligentsia, and gender role discussions in these tales. Some of them are truly for children, others are more for adults, but all of them are written in a fairytalish form with a light touch. Сказка о необитаемом острове (A Tale of the Desert Island) about the adventures of two young ones, Il’ka and Fedya, is, to my taste, the most touching story in the collection.

Boris Minaev is a different case: he is someone who started as a children’s writer and moved into adult literature later on. His Детство Левы (Leva’s Childhood) is a quite realistic story of Soviet Jewish childhood in the early 1970s. It is almost a memoir with details which are very familiar to anyone who lived through these times: the yard outside of the apartment building, soccer and other games, the Victory Day celebration, the fear of darkness, a hole in the asphalt which turned out to be a cave without a treasure, a children’s movie for 10 kopeks in the local movie theater, and a first cheap cigarette.

Another time-traveling experience is Boris Akunin’s Детская книга (Children’s Book). It is a part of his famous Fandorin series, but this time the main character is not an Erast Fandorin, an aristocrat and an adventurist, and not his grandson, a Moscow detective, but his great grandson and namesake who lives in contemporary Moscow and travels to 1914, to the time of Boris Godunov in the 17^th century, and to the future with the help of “chronoholes.” It is a combination of adventure novel and historical fiction, and a page turner.

The postmodern tales of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (Lyudmila Petrushevskaya) are really in their own category. The longer I read them, the more I am convinced that they are not in the realm of children’s literature. Their dark and absurdist humor targets a much more mature audience, even though the series about Barbie dolls from the collection Настоящие сказки (The Real Tales) looks like children’s stories, and many other stories refer to classical fairy-tales. A similar literary device was used by Alexander Kabakov in his Московские сказки (The Moscow Tales), where he applies well-known fairy-tales and legends, like the Tower of Babel, to contemporary situations.

For more: Olga Bukhina often writes Russian-language posts for a blog maintained by the Working Group for Study of Russian Children’s Literature and Culture. The blog also contains pieces written in English.

Up next: A few notes on BookExpo America and Read Russia, then a post about an actual book I’ve read. Maybe Zakhar Prilepin’s The Black Monkey... I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to getting back to writing about my books!

Disclaimers: The usual.

The Jury Speaks: 2011 Big Book Award Winners

I’d like to thank the 2011 Big Book jury for making it easy for me to write this post. This year’s Big Book readers and jury chose the same book—Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник (Letter-Book) (previous post)—as their big winner. The jury gave second prize to Vladimir Sorokin’s Метель (The Blizzard) (previous post), and Dmitrii Bykov’s Остромов, или Ученик чародея (Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice) took third.

After enjoying Fazil Iskander’s stories about a boy called Chik (previous post), I was happy to see that Iskander won this year’s special award “за честь и достоинство” (“for honor and merit/virtue”). A big, thick collection of Iskander’s stories about Sandro of Chegem is on my shelf—not far from Bykov’s big, thick novel about Ostromov—waiting for that winter moment when I desperately need a long book. (I’m glad to have options: I’ve recently been resisting a fifth reading of War and Peace…)

Big Book also recognized Peter Mayer, of Overlook Press and Duckworth, for his contributions to literature. Overlook’s list of fiction translated from Russian over the last several years includes Liudmila Ulitskaya’s Daniel Stein, Interpreter (tr. Arch Tait), Olga Slavnikova’s 2017 (tr. Marian Schwartz), Today I Wrote Nothing, a collection by Daniil Kharms (tr. Matvei Yankelevich), and several novels by Max Frei (tr. Polly Gannon, Ast A. Moore). Nonfiction titles include Frank Westerman’s Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia (tr. Sam Garrett), which I enjoyed very much (previous post). Overlook has owned the Ardis list since 2002.

For more:

• Lenta’s news story
• Big Book’s announcement
• OpenSpace.ru’s news story

Up Next: Booker of the Decade, trip notes from the recent American Literary Translators Association conference, and maybe something about Aleksei Varlamov’s Купол (The Cupola or The Dome), though I’m finding the book rather inert, largely because of the dearth of dialogue.

Disclaimers: The usual. I should note that I always enjoy speaking with Peter Mayer and his Overlook colleagues at events during and around book fairs.

Big Book Readers’ Choices & Tolstoy Event in NYC

Just a quick post for today, to let you know that three books were chosen as reader favorites as part of the Big Book Prize program: Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник (Letter-Book) (previous post), Dmitrii Bykov’s Остромов, или Ученик чародея (Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice), and Iurii Buida’s Синяя кровь (Blue Blood) (previous post). Readers voted online. I, unfortunately, forgot to vote.

I probably would have voted for Blue Blood, which I enjoyed very much despite a rough start. None of the books felt like sure winners or enduring favorites to me, though I certainly understand the appeal of Letter-Book… which I also enjoyed very much despite a rough start. I’m going to keep trying Bykov’s Ostromov in hopes of catching it when I’m in the right mood: it looks good but I think it’s asking to wait until the depths of winter.

Over all, despite some decent books, this year’s shortlist didn’t give me big favorites like last year’s, where I loved both Senchin’s The Yeltyshevs (previous post) and Gigolashvili’s The Devil’s Wheel (previous post). I thought two other, very different books – Pavlov’s dark Asystole (previous post) and Zaionchkovskii’s almost-light Happiness Is Possible (previous post) – were also very good for very different reasons. I’m curious to see which book wins the jury prizes next week particularly since several – those by Bykov, Slavnikova, and Sorokin – have already won major awards.

And a quick note on an event in New York City: on Friday, December 2, 2011, The Coffin Factory and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will host a reading and discussion of Rosamund Bartlett’s Tolstoy: A Russian Life at 192 Books, 190 10^th Avenue. The book, which was released in early November, is a 560-page biography of Lev Tolstoy. The event, scheduled for 7-8:30 p.m., has a listing on Facebook here.

Up Next: Trip report from the American Literary Translators Association conference, winners of the Big Book jury prize and the Booker of the Decade, and, eventually, Veniamin Kaverin’s Открытая книга (Whether I think this is The Open Book or An Open Book remains an open question…).

Disclaimers: The usual. And of course I still want to translate Senchin’s Yeltyshevs…

2011 NOSE Long List

It’s been a long time since I’ve methodically gone through an entire long or short list for an award, adding links and descriptions… so here you go: the entire 25-member 2011 НОС/NOSE award long list, with a few notes, including links to previous posts about the four books I’ve read. As usual, I’m sure some of the title translations are awful due to lack of context. The NOSE award is a program of the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund.

I’m also sure more summaries, excerpts, and full texts are floating around in the Runet, but this warm fall day keeps calling me away from my computer! Though a few books sound interesting, I can’t say I found anything new on the list that I feel compelled to seek out right away, particularly since there seem to be a lot of short story collections and nonfiction books on the list. Marina Palei, whom I’ve been meaning to read for some time, is probably at the top of my list.

1. Andrei Astvatsaturov: Скунскамера (Skunskamera), a book that’s a veteran of long and short lists.

2. Karine Arutiunova: Пепел красной коровы (Ash from the Red Cow), a collection of very short stories.

3. Marina Akhmedova: Дневник смертницы. Хадижа (Diary of a Death Girl. Khadizha. [a key title word can mean a prisoner condemned to death or a suicide bomber]), a novel about a Dagestani girl that Akhmedova based on stories of real girls in the Northern Caucasus.

4. Nikolai Baitov: Думай, что говоришь (Think When You Speak). Short stories (41 in 320 pages) from a poet.

5. Il’ia Boiashov: Каменная баба (The Stone Woman) (previous post)

6. Iana Vagner: Вонгозеро (Vongozero), a debut novel about a nasty flu; the book grew out of Live Journal posts.

7. Igor’ Vishnevetskii: Ленинград (Leningrad), a novella set in Leningrad during World War 2 that Vishnevetskii says is a postscript of sorts to Andrei Belyi’s Petersburg because he imagined Belyi’s characters in his own book. For more: Svobodanews.ru interview with Vishnevetskii here.

8. Natal’ia Galkina: Табернакль (Tabernacle)

9. Dj Stalingrad: Исход (could be Exodus or something like The Outcome), apparently about leftwing skinheads.

10. Dmitrii Danilov: Горизонтальное положение (Horizontal Position) (previous post)

11. Nikolai Kononov: Фланёр (The Flâneur), a novel set in the 1930s and 1940s. (OpenSpace.ru review)

12. Aleksandr Markin: Дневник 2006–2011 (Diary 2006-2011), Live Journal posts from Russia’s first LJ blogger. (This seems to be a common thread this year…) Comments on Ozon.ru note Markin’s interest in German literature and European architecture.

13. Aleksei Nikitin: Истеми (İstemi), a novel about bored students who create a geopolitical game and get in trouble. (The description on the Ad Marginem site is much more complicated.) Risk, anyone?

14. Marina Palei: Дань саламандре (beginning end) (Tribute [the monetary kind] for the Salamander) was also long-listed for the National Bestseller award.

15. Viktor Pelevin: Ананасная вода для прекрасной дамы (Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady), a bestselling story collection.

16. Andrei Rubanov: Тоже родина (Also a Motherland), a story collection.

17. Maria Rybakova: Гнедич (Gnedich), a novel in verse about Russian poet Nikolai Gnedich, the first Russian translator of The Iliad. Rybakova is also a poet. Excerpt

18. Figl’-Migl’: Ты так любишь эти фильмы (You Love Those Films So Much), a NatsBest finalist that lost in a tie breaker vote when Kseniia Sobchak cast her vote for Dmitrii Bykov instead. Sobchak said in an interview that she doesn’t consider F-M’s book literature. She also compares Bykov to McDonald’s and says she hates his ЖД (Living Souls) (previous post). Take that!

19. Margarita Khemlin: Крайний (Krainii: my previous post explains the title)

20. Andrei Sharyi and Iaroslav Shimov: Корни и корона (Roots and the Crown), essays about Austro-Hungary. (OpenSpace.ru review)

21. Mikhail Shishkin: Письмовник (Letter-Book) (previous post)

22. Nina Shnirman: Счастливая девочка (Lucky Girl) (excerpt); a book about a girl’s childhood that includes World War 2. I’m not clear if it’s strictly memoir or somewhat fictionalized. Either way, it was a Cosmo book of the month!

23. Gleb Shul’piakov: Фес (Fes or Fez, as you prefer), a novel. The publisher’s description says Fes is about a man who brings his wife to the maternity hospital and, when left to his own devices, ends up in a basement in an unidentified eastern city… sounds like more warped reality.

24. Aleksandr Iablonskii: Абраша (Abrasha), a novel with a vague summary.

25. Irina Iasina: История болезни (Case History) appears to be a memoir about having multiple sclerosis.

Up next: I’m hoping to finish Sergei Kuznetsov’s Хоровод воды (The Round Dance of Water) in time for a post next week.

Bykov Wins NatsBest (Again)

Dmitrii Bykov won the 2011 National Bestseller Award (NatsBest) for his novel Остромов, или Ученик чародея (Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice). Bykov is a repeat winner of the NatBest: he won in 2006 for Boris Pasternak. Ostromov is the final book of a trilogy, following Оправдание (Justification) and Орфография (Orthography). Ozon.ru’s listing for all three novels in one volume, which weighs in at 992 pages and 1345 grams, includes brief descriptions.

Update, June 6, 2011: Given Dmitrii Bykov's high public profile, I wondered how long this would take... Lenta.ru reports that Vadim Levental', chair of the NatsBest Organizational Committee, expressed his dissatisfaction with Bykov's win. My summary: Levental' said Bykov is already well-known and widely read therefore doesn't fit the award's goal of finding a book with unrealized potential to become an intellectual bestseller. Prochtenie.ru shows jury voting tied at two each for Bykov and Figl'-Migl', leaving jury chair Kseniia Sobchak to cast the deciding vote. She voted for Bykov but expressed her preference for Mikhail Elizarov's Мультики ('Toons), which won one jury vote.

2011 NatsBest Short List

The 2011 National Bestseller shortlist is in. Here are the finalists, in Russian alphabetical order, with the number of points they accumulated during their journey from long to short list:

• Dmitrii Bykov: Остромов, или Ученик чародея (Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice) (11 points)
• Mikhail Elizarov: Мультики (‘Toons) (6 points)
• Pavel Peppershtein: Пражская ночь (Prague Night) (6 points) (excerpt)
• Andrei Rubanov: Психодел (Psychodeal) (6 points)
• Figl’-Migl’: Ты так любишь эти фильмы (You Love Those Films So Much) (6 points)
• Sergei Shargunov: Книга без фотографий (A Book Without Photographs) (5 points)

A few notes:

• Elizarov’s book, ‘Toons, is the only one I’ve read (previous post) thus far.
• The writer known as Figl’-Migl’ is new to me: this pseudonym means “trick” (though the Russian term is plural) so I guess I’ll think of this writer as The Trickster.
• Bykov has already won the NatsBest award once.
• The winner will be announced on June 5. The jury for the next level is chaired by Kseniia Sobchak….
• Comments about any books you’ve read, want to read, or have no intention of reading would be most welcome!

There’s a bit more here on OpenSpace.ru.

Going Round and Round: Bykov’s ЖД

Great idea. Messy execution. That pretty much sums up my thoughts on Dmitrii Bykov’s novel ЖД (ZhD) (chapters here), which Alma Books recently released in an English version as Living Souls (PDF excerpt here).

The great idea: ZhD presents an alternative view of Russian history and politics, in which northerners (Varangians) and southerners (Khazars) live in ongoing conflict. History moves in endless cycles, as do people who literally walk and ride around in circles. The book takes place in a post-petroleum near future, and many of Bykov’s characters are in the military and/or romantic couples. I’m giving only the barest summary here because the Glas site provides so much information (warning: including many spoilers) here.

ZhD gave me an odd case of déjà vu. Like Bykov’s Списанные (The List), which I read last summer (post here), ZhD left me thinking Bykov couldn’t decide if he wanted to write essays or a novel. Both books contain many, many pages of heavy-deep-and-real conversations that could conceivably occur in life but, for my taste, felt too repetitive or contrived for fiction. I’m glad Bykov broaches difficult topics but his methods and his humor, which can get a little shticky (in these senses, not these), just don’t seem to grab me.

I frequently lost interest during the political discussions and background: even when they started out topical and intriguing, there was often too much of a good thing. Worse, they detracted from the book’s stronger layers. I most enjoyed sections when Bykov let his characters out into the world, where they could experience rather than just talk. Some scenes were fantastical, like a ghost telegraphist mentioning eternal war. I also thought an officer’s lousy Moscow home leave showed bureaucracy and spiritual poverty quite nicely. I particularly liked Bykov’s characters called Vas’ki, people who wander Russia and lack memory but have their own peculiar wisdom. They reminded me of holy fools.

Bykov includes all sorts of literal and metaphorical circles in ZhD. The title characters of ZhD want to reject what Bykov calls the замкнутый круг (vicious circle) of history, preferring to get off the track and create something new – children, a future – rather than wander the world and, ultimately, history, in circles, like the living dead.

From a historical perspective, the circles in ZhD are part of a literary progression. First: Dante’s Divine Comedy, a poem, featured circles of Hell. Second: Nikolai Gogol called his Dead Souls a poem and wanted to create a Russian Divine Comedy. Third: Bykov evokes Gogol by calling ZhD a poem and saying the title letters could stand for живые души, “living souls.” And Bykov includes lots of hellish-sounding circles.

Though ZhD felt overloaded at 685 pages, I’m sure readers who enjoy novels of ideas with characters chewing the political and historical fat will love it. Even some readers who don’t like all the chat may come away feeling more positive than I did: a Russian friend who told me she liked ZhD admitted, upon pointed questioning, that she’d skimmed.

Readers of the English translation, Living Souls, may feel less urge to skim. The English version of the book is roughly 50 pages shorter than the Russian original that my friend and I read. The Living Souls translator, Cathy Porter, told me in e-mail correspondence that, in collaboration with Bykov, she didn’t chop but chose to prune things like repetition and untranslatable Russian word play, to keep the narrative moving without losing the book’s humor and poetry. Porter said Bykov, who encouraged a free translation, thoroughly appreciates her tightening of the text.

Reading level for non-native readers: 3/5, average difficulty. I found it most difficult to plow through the repetition.

Bykov's Living Souls on Amazon

Listed in the Zero Years

Dmitrii Bykov seems to write everything: novels, poetry, essays, literary and film criticism, even voiceovers for the documentary Девственность (Virginity). Bykov knits together elements from many of those forms in Списанные (The List), a 2008 novel that portrays aspects of Moscow life in the нулевые годы – the “zero years,” our strange current decade that apparently has no name in American English but is called “the noughties” in British English.

The book’s title refers to around 180 souls who discover they’ve been placed on a mysterious list. The verb списать (spisat’) can mean copy, and it’s the root for список (list), but it can also mean “write off” in an accounting sense.

Bykov focuses on Sergei Sviridov, a young screenwriter who, at the start of the book, is flying to a film festival in Ukraine with Маленькое чудо (The Little Miracle), a treacly sounding children’s film about a young ballerina. The List tracks Sviridov’s life after he learns he’s on the list. He meets other listees, first through the Internet, then in person, spending time with them at a dacha party, cafes, and his own bed. Despite all the meetings and events, some of which sound painfully predictable and Soviet, Bykov relies more on psychology and conversations than dramatic plot twists to move The List.

Though the list’s provenance remains something of a mystery and still feels sinister even at the end of the book, I came to see the list as a tool that characters used to build relationships and fill vacuums in their zero years lives. One chapter even covers who sleeps with whom, a Dionysian list within the list.

With all its slang, borrowed words, verbal tics, and commentary on contemporary Russian politics and culture, The List feels almost self-consciously set in our time. Bykov’s tinges of Kafka, Dostoevsky, fantasy, and the grotesque (to borrow from the blurb on the back of my book) seem, paradoxically, to add to its almost documentary atmosphere. Life is, after all, absurd.

For me, the book’s biggest shortcoming is that some passages are too busy with discussions about politics and philosophy, or cultural references. (One page mentions both Vladimir Zhabotinskii and David Cronenberg.) Though I could imagine many of the conversations taking place in what passes for real life, I thought many of the denser idea-based sections felt inorganic to the book, as if Bykov-essayist had temporarily overruled Bykov-novelist. I much preferred Bykov-novelist’s straightforward scenes focusing on Sviridov’s emotions and relationships.

With so much diverse material, I suspect that List readers have very different takes on what dominates: some will read it as a humorous novel, others will find a social novel about repression and politics in post-Soviet Russia, I see a picture of loneliness and attempts to understand what passes for reality. And so on.

The List left me with an unusual and rather odd ambivalence. Though I enjoyed some sections – like Sviridov’s struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder – when I finished, I felt a little underwhelmed. Most of the themes and ideas were familiar from the news, other fiction, and my own life. That is, I suppose, the downside of a book that focuses so closely on the present day.

The other side of my ambivalence is this: I understand why someone might like all of The List. I know many fiction readers enjoy reading political and philosophical conversations, and I suspect the book could well appeal to readers outside Russia, in translation, as one writer’s fictional but documentary-feeling picture of Russia in the noughties.

Speaking of translations: A blog reader mentioned that Alma Books is preparing a translation of another Bykov novel, ЖД, which Alma’s blog says may be translated as Living Souls or Jewhad. The post calls Living Souls “this 800-page maelstrom of a novel.” Alma also provides an interesting perspective on Russian contemporary fiction. To paraphrase, the continuing influences of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky make it difficult to export Russian writers, but Alma sees value in what “could be the classics of the future.” (Alma Books post)