Two Theater Novels: Bulgakov & Akunin

Reading, Act I: Mikhail Bulgakov’s short, unfinished novel Театральный роман: Записки покойника (known in English by such titles as A Dead Man’s Memoir: A Theatrical Novel and Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel)

Reading, Act II: Boris Akunin’s too-long but too-tidy novel Весь мир театр (literally All the World’s a Theater or All the World’s a Stage)

My reaction: Polite, restrained applause, an indifferent shrug, and a quick exit.

I enjoy a good theater production from time to time but I realized after these two books that I’m not wild enough about the stage – despite having helped present Russian theater here in Portland, Maine, back in the early ‘90s – to read fiction about it. It doesn’t help that I don’t think either of these books is its author’s best… I knew the Bulgakov might be an unsatisfying unfinished novel. (Check!) And I suspected the Akunin might be an unsatisfying potboiler. (Check!) So.

A Theatrical Novel fictionalizes Bulgakov’s experiences working with the Moscow Art Theater (МХАТ) but I’ll focus on summarizing my impressions of the novel rather than decoding “кто есть who” (who’s who). Wikipedia has a full Russian-language plot summary and list of prototypes for characters here. (Google Translate transliterates the list of characters and renders the entry’s narrative into something moderately readable.)

For me, the best fun of A Theatrical Novel was reading about the reactions of the narrator, an unknown writer who admits he’s written a lousy novel, to a director’s demands for revisions to the stage adaptation of the novel: a dagger, for example, must replace a gun. I also thoroughly enjoyed the humor, dialogue, outlandish names (e.g. Poliksena Toropetskaya), and, yes, theatrical behavior in many of the set pieces. Despite the combination of some good laughs and Bulgakov’s scathing portrayal of censorship and theater figures, though, A Theatrical Novel felt uneven and unfinished enough that it left me indifferent. I suspect theater buffs will appreciate its characterizations and situations more than I did.

Alas, Akunin’s book was even more disappointing, despite my low expectations: I think only the first nine Fandorin detective novels are readable. All the World’s a Theater finds Erast Petrovich Fandorin in his fifties in 1911; Petr Stolypin has just been shot in, yes, a theater. Fandorin is soon to go gaga over an actress, Eliza, whom he meets through Olga Knipper. Knipper thinks Eliza, who is much younger than Fandorin, needs Fandorin’s help. Fandorin, ever the Renaissance man, obliges, turning dramaturge to write a play with parts for Eliza and himself and then, of course, investigating when corpses start appearing.

What’s most unfortunate about All the World’s a Theater is that it lacks the verve and narrative drive of the initial Fandorin books: the book feels weighted down with Fandorin’s romantic thoughts and Akunin’s clichéd attempts at contrasting and overlapping art/theater with life/reality. (Like Bulgakov, Akunin has also had dealings with adaptations.) The “Бедная Лиза” (“Poor Liza”) connection of the very first Fandorin novel is made yawningly obvious this time, and Fandorin’s play is included in the book. I’ll confess: I skipped it. I plodded through the pages as I plodded through the miles on the treadmill but the book didn’t made the walk feel much shorter. I guess I hadn’t missed Fandorin that much.

Level for non-native readers of Russian: A Theatrical Novel might have been a bit more difficult than All The World's a Theater, for 2.5/5 and 2.0/5 respectively.

Next up: Мультики (Toons), Mikhail Elizarov’s rather odd follow-up to the Booker-winning Библиотекарь (The Librarian) (previous post)… I think my reading slump is ending, though: I’m loving Oleg Zaionchkovskii’s Счастье возможно: роман нашего времени (Happiness Is Possible: A Novel of Our Time).

Photo: weatherbox, via sxc.hu

Various versions of A Theatrical Novel on Amazon

Boris Akunin on Amazon

(The small print: As an Amazon "affiliate," I receive a small commission when readers click on my Amazon links and make purchases. Thank you!)

Schwartz’s White Guard Translation Wins AATSEEL Prize

Translator Marian Schwartz announced on her Web site that her translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Белая гвардия (White Guard) won the 2009 award for best translation into English from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL). I have never been able to get into White Guard but will keep trying – several friends have recommended it to me very highly, so I, the ever-moody reader, probably just need to find the right mood.

Schwartz’s site also lists her works in progress, which include Leonid Iusefovich’s (Yusefovich) Big Book award winner, Журавли и карлики (Cranes and Pygmies). Her translation of Olga Slavnikova’s Booker-winning 2017 (sample here) is scheduled for release by Overlook Press in March 2010. I’m set: I moved 2017 up to the top of my bookshelf for reading after Cranes and Pygmies, which I plan to start today. 2017 draws on Urals folk stories by Pavel Bazhov so that’s on the shelf, too, thanks to a friend from Ekaterinburg. Bazhov’s stories have been translated into English.

The list of nominees for AATSEEL’s book awards is fun to browse (here) for past winners and present nominees in four categories. I don’t know who won this year’s other awards but saw some familiar names in the literary/cultural criticism category, including one of my former professors, Gary Saul Morson, author of “Anna Karenina” in Our Times: Seeing More Wisely. The 30+ criticism nominees address a broad range of other topics like Russians in Hollywood, Russian symbolists and sex, sex and violence in Russian popular culture, Bakhtin, Lermontov, Pushkin, Gogol’… some excellent options for blowing a book budget!

Marian Schwartz's Translation of White Guard on Amazon
Pavel Bazhov on Amazon
Marian Schwartz's translation of 2017 on Amazon

News Roundup: Survey Says, Awards, and Gulag

1. Survey Says: Master and Margarita! Please don’t ask me about survey methodology… but OpenSpace.ru reported earlier this week that the research center of the SuperJobs.ru portal polled 3,000 Russians and found that their favorite book was Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Sixteen percent voted for M&M. Respondents were allowed to name several books.

Runner up was Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace (see sidebar for previous posts on W&P) with 7 percent, followed by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, at 3 percent. Others on the list, with 1 percent: Dostoevsky’s Idiot and Brothers Karamazov, Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Ilf and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs, Aleksandr Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, Aleksandr Griboedov’s To Woe from Wit, and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls.

Foreign books were also eligible. The one-percenters: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo and Three Musketeers, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades.

2. Yasnaya Polyana Award Finalists. The three finalists for the Yasnaya Polyana literary prize are: Vasilii Golovanov for Остров (The Island), Igor’ Malyshev for Dom (The House), and Roman Senchin for Елтышевы (The Yeltyshevs) (book in Russian: beginning end). OpenSpace.ru writes that one of the prize’s jury members, Lev Anninskii, says the finalists were chosen because their books give Russian readers hope that the country will come out of its moral crisis.

The only writer of the three that I’ve read is Senchin: His Нубук (Nubuck) is about, yes, selling shoes in the 1990s. His Минус (Minus) has been translated into English, by Arch Tait. The publisher, Glas, has information and a link to an excerpt here.

The Rasskazy anthology I keep writing about contains a Senchin story, too, “Тоже история” (“History”), translated by Victoria Mesopir. The story has a documentary feel, first introducing a 62-year-old historian studying 1930s Germany, then placing him in the middle of contemporary Russian history, when he happens upon an opposition demonstration. Though the historical parallels felt a little too obvious for me and I’m not a big fan of meeting contemporary public figures in fiction, something about Senchin’s portrayal of the historian, a well-read man who is ignorant of his own country’s present, felt familiar and true.

3. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag in Schools. The New York Times, among others, reported that excerpts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Архипелаг ГУЛАГ (The Gulag Archipelago) have become part of the Russian school program. (Times story, from the Associated Press, here.) OpenSpace notes (here) that the program for schoolchildren already included Solzhenitsyn’s “Матренин двор” (“Matryona’s Home”) and Один день Ивана Денисовича (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) (previous post on Ivan Denisovich).

Photo: “A sculpture of the cat Behemoth from the novel The Master and Margarita, on a wall in Andriyivskyy Descent, Kyiv,” 2005, from Wikipedia Commons, user Boulgakov.

Favorite Russian Writers A to Я: Bulgakov and Brodsky

The Russian letter Б – B in the Roman alphabet – is tremendously busy! A letter has to be pretty good if the list of not-favorite authors includes Isaak Babel, Andrei Belyi, and Ivan Bunin.

But then there is Mikhail Bulgakov, whose novella Собачье сердце (Heart of a Dog) has been a favorite for years, thanks to Bulgakov’s humor in depicting bureaucracy, the Soviet housing shortage, and what I will just call a medical transformation. I thoroughly enjoyed Bulgakov’s play Иван Васильевич (Ivan Vasilyevich) in late 2007, too. (Previous post)

Though I have a more complicated relationship with Мастер и Маргарита (Master and Margarita), I love the Soviet-era passages -- particularly Satan’s ball and certain other scenes involving unclean forces -- more than enough to put Bulgakov onto my favorites list. Next time I read M&M I will use Kevin Moss’s Master & Margarita Web site to compensate for my embarrassingly anemic knowledge of the Bible. Maybe then the many sections of the book set in Biblical times will mean more to me, and I’ll be able to connect the novel’s two tracks.

I also want to mention a poet: Joseph Brodsky. I first read Brodsky in grad school, rather incidentally, when a professor handed out Brodsky’s “Бабочка” (“The Butterfly”) as an example of a poem whose shape mirrors its content. A few years later, I was asked to translate a few Brodsky poems for a stage production. The poems were horrifically difficult for me, and when I asked a Russian co-worker for help, he also found them difficult and told me he thought of Brodsky’s poems as an uncomfortable house that he didn’t enjoy visiting. I’ve heard similar comments from other Russians.

I understood. But now that nearly 20 years have passed and I’ve increased my Russian vocabulary and cultural knowledge, I love visiting Brodsky’s poetic house. I read his work rather randomly so don’t know why I seem to have a preference for his poems from the ‘70s, though I know it’s the existential themes I like best. One of my favorites so far, “Я сижу у окна,” reads as an interpretation-translation in Howard Moss’s English-language New Yorker version, “I Sit by the Window.”

The B-List for Future Reading: There’s a lot to look forward to in the letter Б: I want to make amends to Ivan Bunin by reading beyond “Солнечный удар” (“Sunstroke”), the first story in a collection I never quite seem to get into… perhaps something longer, like Жизнь Арсеньева (The Life of Arsenyev) or Деревня (The Village), will hold my interest. Then there is Isaak Babel’, whose Конармия (Red Cavalry) scared me off with its brutality. I think it’s finally time to read all Babel’s Одесские рассказы (Odessa Stories). One of these years I will also get to Petr Boborykin’s Китай-город (transliterated: Kitai-gorod; the translation Chinatown is a false friend... see comments for more), which has been sitting on my shelf, untouched, for years, though it comes highly recommended by several friends.

My reread list includes Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog and Andrei Belyi’s Петербург (Petersburg), which I remember as a difficult but very rewarding symbolist novel. I also want to put in a better effort at reading Bulgakov’s Белая гвардия (The White Guard); maybe the third attempt will be a charm. 

Bulgakov on Amazon

Bunin on Amazon
Belyi on Amazon
Brodsky on Amazon
Babel on Amazon

"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

Mikhail Bulgakov and Ivan Vasilyevich

It’s no mystery why Leonid Gaidai’s “Иван Васильевич меняет профессию” (“Ivan Vasilyevich Changes Profession”) became a Soviet box office hit. The movie has everything: antic comedy and gags, songs, a pretender to the throne, Ivan the Terrible, satire on Soviet bureaucracy, a geeky hero named Shurik, a time machine, and more. This YouTube video of one of the first scenes will give you a sense of its now-retro feel.

Several of Gaidai’s movies remain so popular that many Russian can recite famous lines -- I knew a couple from “Ivan Vasilyevich” without realizing where they came from! The screenplay for “Ivan Vasilyevich” is particularly rich with humor because it’s based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Ivan Vasilyevich, written in 1935-1936. The movie retains much of the play’s dialogue despite transferring action from the 1930s to the 1970s. I can’t find evidence that the play is available in English, but it shares characters, including Ivan the Terrible, and motifs with a predecessor, Bulgakov’s 1934 Блаженство, available in English as Bliss.

Readers of Bulgakov’s novel Мастер и Маргарита (Master and Margarita) will recognize some familiar elements, albeit on a smaller scale, in “Ivan Vasilyevich.” Although the two works may not seem to have much in common, both involve demons, witches, and unclean spirits, either as characters or superstitions. Both also center around mysterious occurrences and neighbors in Soviet apartment buildings. Though Ivan Vasilyevich, at 40 pages, lacks the richness of M&M, its contrasts – historical and contemporary, reality and fantasy – encourage thought along with the fun.

I loved watching the movie and highly recommend it to students of Russian language, literature, and culture. Even if you don’t enjoy Soviet humor – it’s an acquired taste for many westerners – or catch cultural references, “Ivan Vasilyevich” is worth watching. It’s an important remnant of Soviet popular culture and an example of Mikhail Bulgakov’s wonderful imagination and comedy. Best of all, you can sample clips on YouTube, then add the DVD to your Netflix list! It is now known as "Ivan Vasilievich - Back to the Future" in English.

In this posting:

Mikhail Bulgakov on Amazon
Leonid Gaidai on Amazon (all four are classics)