Totally: Novellas by Chukovskaya and Iskander

I first read Lydia Chukovskaya’s Софья Петровна (Sofia Petrovna) in the early ‘90s, when I lived in Moscow: it was one of six pieces in a collection called Трудные повести (Difficult Novellas) that also included Andrei Platonov’s Котлован (The Foundation Pit). My reading skills weren’t ready for Platonov then but I could read and appreciate Sofia Petrovna quickly, easily, without a dictionary. The novella was even more satisfying because I could tell Chukovskaya’s direct, unembellished language was the perfect medium for a story about a Leningrad widow whose son Kolya, an engineer, is arrested in the 1930s.

I appreciated Sofia Petrovna even more this time around, watching Chukovskaya unwind the story of Sofia Petrovna, a loyal Soviet citizen who becomes more and more unhinged trying to handle difficulties at work and the cruelly impossible task of finding her son. Chukovskaya experienced similar humiliations—she wrote the novella during November 1939-February 1940, after the arrest of her husband, which makes it even more remarkable—and demonstrates the effects of totalitarianism with painfully striking precision.

I’m thinking of totalitarianism in the second definition in my Webster’s New [sic: it’s dated 1981] Collegiate Dictionary—“the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an absolute state authority”—more than the first definition’s “centralized control by an autocratic authority” that creates the political concept. Chukovskaya’s novella is less about the system itself than its effects on the thinking and actions of regular people, represented by a circle of family and friends anchored by Sofia Petrovna. The book draws the reader into her psyche as Soviet life wears her down.

We hear Sofia Petrovna’s doubts about Kolya’s activity and friendships, experience her pain when her communal apartment neighbors say nasty things, and feel her deflation when she has brief audiences with government officials after waiting for hours, even days. As the novella continues and we witness her evolution from a happy, optimistic publishing house administrator to a recluse who barely eats, it’s not difficult to understand her confusion, her delusions, or her fears of everybody.

After Chukovskaya’s book I picked up a collection by Fazil’ Iskander and chose Сумрачной юности свет (The Light of Murky Youth) for one reason: at 75 pages, it was the longest piece in the book. I didn’t know the story was about an Abkhaz man, Zaur, whose father was shot during the Stalinist terror. Most of the story takes place when Zaur is an adult—there are mentions of Khrushchev—and the most vivid aspect of the story for me, perhaps because of my lingering thoughts on Sofia Petrovna, was the uneasy balance of private and public in Zaur’s life. That made the story feel like a later generation’s update on totalitarianism.

Iskander gives Zaur a childhood with public Stalin portraits and an adulthood that values privacy and individuality, whether he’s writing to the Central Committee about the need for more private farming or trying to find a place to be alone with his girlfriend. Though Iskander deftly blends believable characters with lots of telling episodes about required volunteer work, sneaking into forbidden places, police behavior, family pressures, and politics, the story felt a little lumpy to me. But that’s a minor complaint, what with the strong pull of the conflict between control and privacy (always a favorite), and Iskander’s ability to, like Chukovskaya, create vivid scenes, portraits, and stories out of simple words and complex human situations.

Level for Non-Native Readers of Russian: Though I think the language in Sofia Petrovna is easier than the language in The Light of Murky Youth, I’d recommend both to readers looking for relatively easy novellas.

Up Next: Perhaps Mikhail Lipskerov’s Белая горячка. Delirium Tremens, which I began reading today at the beach. If I don’t like the book as reading material it may still have an honored place in my life and beach bag: it’s a paperback of the perfect size and thickness for killing the stinging beach flies that love to hover around my ankles.

Fazil Iskander on Amazon
Sofia Petrovna on Amazon

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“Horizontal Position, Sleep”: Danilov’s Diary-as-Novel, Horizontal Position

Dmitrii Danilov’s Горизонтальное положение (Horizontal Position), which I read in the abridged journal version published in Novyi mir, was a pleasant surprise: the beginning of the book looked completely unprepossessing to me when I first scanned through it online, with many of the very short sentences in the book’s first diary entry containing little more than street names and information about travel on public transportation.

But Danilov won me over. I’m sure it helps that his narrator and I are both corporate writers and have visited many of the same places, from Mytishchi to Arkhangel’sk to Russian Bookstore No. 21 in New York City. Far more important, though, was Danilov’s ability to fill—and connect—the diary entries with everyday material about the narrator’s work, travels, and downtime. Horizontal Position is a rare case of a book where brand names don’t irritate me. Danilov makes them feel almost anthropological: the narrator mentions Live Journal, Flickr, a Yankee cap, and even a Hummus Place restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (“вай-фай, ура!” – “wifi, hurray!”), pinpointing time and place with tremendously spare, repetitive language.

So what happens in Horizontal Position? An apparently single guy who turns 40 during the course of the book writes diary entries about life and his corporate work, much of it for the oil and gas industry. He travels for work, discusses taking a course in religion, and mentions literary pursuits. He rarely reveals much if something rattles or pleases him—he seems restrained, almost inert, at least in the text—even when he has an unhappy client. There’s some dry humor: I particularly enjoyed the passage when a client asks him to make a corporate text more artistic and lyrical. He tells us he plays an online fantasy (?) soccer game. He tells us what he does before he gets into a horizontal position to go to sleep, sometimes in uncomfortable beds. Countless entries end with “Горизонтальное положение. Сон.” – “Horizontal Position. Sleep.”

The key to Horizontal Position is the epigraph, from Iurii Mamleev’s “Серые дни” (“Gray Days”): “Но в общем все осталось по-прежнему и ничего не изменилось, хотя как будто и произошли события.” – “But for the most part everything remained as it had been and nothing had changed, though apparently some things had happened.” Sure, I know Danilov’s narrator reads Crime and Punishment and Sergei Samsonov’s Аномалия Камлаева (The Kamlaev Anomaly), listens to Splin, and eats a lot of hummus in New York because of the free Wifi. I even know, in excruciating detail, his Moscow travel routes.

Despite all those details, though, I don’t know much about the man’s ambitions. And you can probably tell that I don’t remember if he has a name or not… I could swear something gave me the idea he was a Dmitrii, like his creator, but now I can’t remember/find where I got that sense. But it suits me if the narrator is anonymous—or reveals but doesn’t want me to remember his name—since he stands in for all our days, weeks, months, and years that feel like we’re living in what a college friend thought of as personal human Habitrails, shuttling ourselves from place to place to do whatever we must. Meaning: I know nothing but everything about this guy. Blogger Заметил просто, who also doesn’t use a name for the narrator, refers to the guy’s limited choices, like taking one bus instead of another. (Hmm, this reminds me of something else…) And no matter where you are, at home, on a train, or in your сингл-рум (single room) on the Upper West Side, you’re likely to end up in a horizontal position at the end of the day unless, of course, you’re on a plane.

I should add that Horizontal Position is a 2011 Big Book Award finalist; I’ve now read four of the 10 books (Danilov, Slavnikova, Sorokin, and Shishkin) and abandoned one (Arabov). Horizontal Position is my favorite so far in terms of sheer readability. The diary form makes it easy to read one more entry, then another, and I enjoyed the narrator’s sneaky humor, even if I thought Danilov shouldn’t have let him spend so much time in New York. I forgave him when the narrator staged a minor rebellion toward the end, exhausted from all his travel and record-keeping.

Reading Level for Non-Native Readers of Russian: 2/5, relatively easy. With its simple, repetitive, and often practical language, I think Horizontal Position would be a very, very fun book to teach. Horizontal Position is also an ideal book to read on an electronic reader.

Up Next: Кафедра (The Faculty) by I(rina) Grekova. I picked up Grekova after a disastrous attempt to read Leonid Andreev’s Sashka Zhegulev, which Stephen Hutchings called “singularly and significantly unsuccessful” in A semiotic analysis of the short stories of Leonid Andreev, 1900-1909. I wondered why Hutchings wasn’t more specific but then read the first 100 or so pages of the book and found such a stylistic and thematic morass that I’m at a loss to explain, too.

Image credit: Brainloc, via sxc.hu.

Notable Newish Translations: A Few Favorites from Life Stories

Ah, short story anthologies! I read the Life Stories collection much like I read Rasskazy last fall: sporadically, out of order, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in English, depending on Internet availability of originals. And I didn’t finish every story. The two books have only one writer in common, Zakhar Prilepin.

Life Stories is more difficult to characterize than Rasskazy, which includes only writers with post-Soviet adulthoods. Life Stories encompasses writers of all ages, many of whom – Pelevin, Makanin, Rubina, and Yuzefovich, among them – are bestsellers and/or winners of large prizes. Plus the content of Life Stories was dictated by a Russian story collection that came out last year: Книга, ради которой объединилилсь писатели, объединить невозможно (roughly: A Book for the Sake of Which Writers Who’d Never Get Together Got Together). Though Life Stories doesn’t translate everything in its Russian predecessor because of copyright, it, like the Russian original, benefits the Vera Hospice Charity Fund and hospice care in Moscow.

Though I enjoyed more in Life Stories than in Rasskazy, I had more of a feeling of discovery reading Rasskazy. I already knew most of the writers in Life Stories, with the exception of Khurgin (see below), but I hadn’t read the majority of the writers in Rasskazy. I especially like finding new writers in anthologies.

I could generalize about which collection has more accomplished or risky or personal or intriguing or important stories, but that’s not fair to you or the stories themselves… both books contain stories that are accomplished, risky, personal, intriguing, and important. And tastes differ. What’s most important is that the two books complement each other, creating a wonderfully compact picture of Russian contemporary fiction that’s awfully fun to read.

There was a lot to like in Life Stories. Here’s what I liked most:

I began and ended Life Stories with Zakhar Prilepin’s “Grandmother, Wasps, Watermelon” (“Бабушка, осы, арбуз”) – I reread it because it didn’t feel right to comment on a story I read four months ago. The story felt even truer the second time, showing gender and ethnic divides during potato harvest, and then a return to a childhood place. I think Prilepin’s great strengths are his spare writing style and his ability to balance so confidently on the edge of sentimentality and brutality. (Translated by Deborah Hoffman.)

I met one new writer in Life Stories: Alexander Khurgin, whose “Earplugs” (“Беруши”) tells the story of a woman who “жила красотой мира и окружающей среды обитания” – “lived by the beauty of the world and of her environmental habitat.” Nelya’s life changes when a co-worker suggests she use earplugs to drown out the neighbors’ noise. I was glad to “find” Khurgin: both his narrative voice and his characters are quirky but not irritatingly so. (Translated by Anne O. Fisher.)

Vladimir Sorokin’s “Black Horse with a White Eye” (“Черная лошадь с белым глазом”) held a nice combination of motifs: the story combines a family scything outing with folk themes when a young girl wanders into the woods to pick berries. She is told not to go far, a signal that something will happen. The story includes bits of accented Russian dialogue, some of which is rendered into English with a rather (too) southern twang. (Translated by Deborah Hoffman.)

Evgenii Grishkovets’s “Serenity” (“Спокойствие”) is typical Grishkovets: an easy-to-read story with insights into human behavior. Though Grishkovets’s stories always feel a little slight to me, this one, like several others, was easy to identify with: its main character stays in the city for the summer, taking it easy while everyone else is away for vacation. Any character who prefers reading over mushroom picking gets some points from me. I’m sure Grishkovets sells so many books because of his relentless позитив (positiveness). (Translated by Paul E. Richardson.)

I already mentioned another favorite, Leonid Yuzefovich’s “Гроза” (“The Storm”), translated by Marian Schwartz, in this post, and I covered Andrei Gelasimov’s story “Жанна” (“Joan”), translated by Alexei Bayer, here.

Disclosure: Russian Information Services provided me with a copy of Life Stories. (I bought another copy of the book as a holiday gift.)

All posts on Life Stories (published by Russian Information Services)

All posts on Rasskazy (published by Tin House)

Life Stories on Amazon

Rasskazy on Amazon

Robert Chandler on Andrei Platonov

This title sure caught my eye: “Andrei Platonov: Russia’s greatest 20^th-century prose stylist?” Here’s a link to the article, Daniel Kalder’s guardian.co.uk interview with translator Robert Chandler.

Chandler, who translated Andrei Platonov’s Котлован (The Foundation Pit) not once but twice, speaks here, among other things, about the repeat translation, Platonov’s language, and some odd realities connected with The Foundation Pit.

I particularly enjoyed reading what Chandler says about working on the collection Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida:

“I worked on this for several years, did most of the translations myself and revised them many times. I read through the proofs with enjoyment – I was still happy with the choices I had made – but there were only two writers whom I was still able to read with real wonder: Pushkin and Platonov.”

The stories? Pushkin’s “Пиковая дама” (“The Queen of Spades”) and Platonov’s “Возвращение” (“The Return”), both of which are personal favorites of mine, too. “The Return,” by the way, is written in fairly simple language, making it a good way for non-native readers of Russian to introduce themselves to Platonov. I wrote a bit about “The Return” in this 2008 Victory Day post.

So is Platonov is Russia’s greatest 20^th-century prose stylist? I’m not sure but Chandler’s interview brought back memories of how much I loved the piercing precision of “The Return.” I think it’s time to push Ювенильное море (The Juvenile Sea) to the top of the book pile.

Previous post on The Foundation Pit

Platonov on Amazon

Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida on Amazon

Platonov image from user 53RUStm, via Wikipedia

Russian Fiction for Non-Native Readers

A reader e-mailed last week asking me to recommend contemporary novels for advanced intermediate students of Russian. I’m happy to – I’ve been meaning to write this post for more than a year! (If you don’t read Russian, don’t despair: the majority of the titles on the list below are available in translation.) First, a few reading suggestions that draw on my experience learning to read Russian fiction:

Start small, not with War and Peace or Crime and Punishment. I built my Russian reading stamina, speed, and fluency with short stories and novellas.

Look for familiar vocabulary. Search out books that fit your vocabulary strengths. For example, war novels may be difficult if you don’t know military terminology.

Use free resources. If you’re not sure what fits your reading level or interests, order books through interlibrary loan or look at texts online for a test read. Sites like Журнальный зал and the Moshkov library are great places to start. Many author sites are helpful, too. Update in 2021: This list from XIX век mentions films, books, and TV and radio shows. Everything helps!

Know why you’re reading. Are you reading for enjoyment or to parse sentences and study vocabulary? Or both? Any goal is fine but choose your books accordingly.

Don’t translate as you read! The less you translate in your head, the faster you’ll build your reading skills. Try to figure out unfamiliar words using context, roots, logic, and intuition before you reach for the dictionary. Reread passages as needed.

Read what interests you. Read genres that keep you turning pages in your native language: don’t feel guilty if you choose action or romance novels! I got back into reading Russian six years ago with detective novels, then I branched out.

Quit while you’re ahead. If you’re not enjoying a book, don’t finish it. Sometimes I pick up abandoned books months or years later and love them.

EZier Reader. From now on, I’ll mention the relative difficulty of books in my posts. I’ll mark the easier ones with an “EZier reader” tag.

Now, the list: Here are some stories and shorter novels that felt relatively easy to me when I read them – remember that individual vocabularies and tolerances differ greatly. I’ll keep commentary minimal to fit as many titles as possible. Please e-mail me or add a comment if you have questions. This is only a small list: other suggestions are welcome!

Some of my Russian reading firsts:

• First short story: Nikolai Karamzin’s Бедная Лиза (Poor Liza)
• First novella: Lev Tolstoy’s Отец Сергий (Father Sergius) (previous post)
• First novel (I think): Julia Voznesenskaya’s Женский декамерон (The Women’s Decameron) – 10 women x 10 days = 100 stories. And very manageable reading.

Pre-1917 Classics:

• Alexander Pushkin’s Повести Белкина (Belkin Tales) and “Пиковая дама” (“The Queen of Spades”) (previous post)
• Fedor Dostoevsky’s Игрок (The Gambler) (previous post) and Белые ночи (White Nights)
• Anton Chekhov (previous post)

Soviet-Era Fiction:

• Sergei Dovlatov’s Компромисс (The Compromise) (previous post)
• Lidiya Chukovskaya’s Софья Петровна (Sofia Petrovna)
• Irina Grekova’s Вдовий пароход (The Ship of Widows) (previous post) or Дамский мастер (The Ladies’ Hairdresser) (previous post)

Contemporary Fiction:

• Boris Akunin’s Любовница смерти and Любовник смерти (Lover of Death, in female and male versions) (previous post)
• Vladimir Sorokin’s Лёд (Ice) (previous post) – not a favorite but it read quickly and fairly easily
• Zakhar Prilepin’s Грех (Sin) (previous post) – Prilepin’s Санькя (San'kia) looks relatively simple in style and language, too.
• Sergei Lukyanenko’s Ночной дозор (Night Watch) – vampires, conspiracy theory, etc.
• Yevgeny Grishkovets’s Рубашка (The Shirt) or “Спокойствие” (“Serenity”) – feel-good and often lite but Grishkovets has a great understanding of psychology that makes it easy to identify with his stories. Unusually easy reading.
• Andrei Gelasimov’s “Жанна” (“Joan”) (previous post) – Gelasimov’s longer work is generally more difficult.
• Leonid Yuzefovich’s “Гроза” (“The Storm”) (previous post – scroll down)
• Rasskazy short stories: Difficulty varies, but some of the pieces in the Rasskazy collection aren’t too hard to read. (posts about Rasskazy)
Photo: Karamzin monument in Simbirsk (Ulyanovsk), from user Mars02, via Wikipedia. (If I'd been feeling more ambitious today, I'd have searched out and scanned a photo of myself standing in front of this monument...)