Hey, Dima! Congratulations on Your Awards for Hey, Sasha!

I’m days late and many dollars short here but very happy to write that Dmitry Danilov won two awards this fall for his novel Саша, привет! (Hey, Sasha!). He won Prose of the Year about two weeks ago and just yesterday he won the Yasnaya Polyana Award, too. Before I go on about Sasha, I should note that Islam Khanipaev won the YP reader’s choice award for his Типа я, which I’ve called Like Me; the book got an impressive 46.3% of the vote.

I read Hey, Sasha! an embarrassingly long time ago. It was so long ago (last year…) that I don’t remember when Danilov sent me the text. Or even which device I read it on. What I do remember, on conscious and subconscious levels, is the reading itself. Everything of Danilov’s that I’ve read – Description of a City, Horizontal Position, and “Black and Green” – speaks to me in similar ways by (to borrow a phrase from his Description) getting into my livers. What’s most remarkable about the fact that Danilov’s prose reaches my livers is that his writing initially looks so simple, almost rudimentary. But he uses that apparent simplicity to great effect, constructing texts that have a surprisingly emotional, almost moving effect. As I wrote in my post about Description of a City, “Danilov has been called a new realist but his realism is a very particular and peculiar realism. His realism is abstract and almost transcendent, a realism with a lot of остранение, defamiliarization.”

With Hey, Sasha!, Danilov adds a huge dose of absurdity to the usual elements of his realism. The short plot summary is that a man, Sergei, a university instructor, commits a moral crime by having consensual sex with a woman under twenty-one. Perpetrators of moral and economic crimes (but not violent crimes) are subject to capital punishment so he’s sentenced to death. He’s imprisoned in a hotel-like place in central Moscow and forced each day to face the possibility that he’ll be shot during a walk down a certain hallway. After that walk, he’s allowed to go out to a park. The hotel-like facility is described as “three-star” and meals are brought to him. Sergei lectures his students over Zoom, though they seem to raise their virtual hands more to ask about their instructor’s situation than to discuss the literature they’re reading. Meanwhile, his wife and the young woman have forgiven him. (His wife, by the way, also teaches literature and deals caustically with students’ curiosity about her husband, ultimately finishing a lecture on the Serapion Brothers by telling her students to read Wikipedia.) Everybody’s forgiven Sergei but the state.

My favorite scenes in this novel – the novel, by the way, reads like a wily blend of a script and a conventional novel – involve religion. Our (anti?)hero receives brief visits from a lama, a rabbi, a priest, and an mullah. None of them really feel they have much to offer to Sergei and they all pretty much urge him to waive his right to have them visit. They speak in rather similar terms, though I particularly liked the rabbi for discussing soccer. And, really, what could the two of them talk about other than sports? As Sergei says, he’s essentially already a dead man. We’ll all die, whether we’re shot in that metaphorical hallway or hit by a chance meteor or stricken by some uncontrollable disease. There’s always something. The point is that no matter who we are, we get up in the morning and walk down some version of that hallway, knowing we might be finished. But we work hard at forgetting, so we can live…

That’s all familiar material – Hey, Sasha! reminds in many ways of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, as one article or social media post (which I now can’t find!) reminded me yesterday – but, as always, Danilov inhabits it and makes it his own both. His stripped-down language and humor are perfect for a tell-it-like-it-is story of this sort. And then there are the Orwellian absurdities of society and the world these days. And isolation that almost reminds of lockdowns, complete with Zoom meetings, though most of us don’t have three-star hotel services that included meals. Best of all is that Hey, Sasha! got into my livers so thoroughly that I barely had to look at the text to remind myself of details, even all these many months after reading the book. I did forget Sergei’s name but I didn’t forget Danilov’s jokes or how the novel keeps flowing along. I also didn’t forget the most important thing: the feeling of mental claustrophobia I always get when I read successful fiction that addresses absurdity, death, and societal norms. I’m sure that feeling of claustrophobia arises largely because art, meaning literature in these cases, so resembles what we consider real life, particularly when depicting various forms of imprisonment, as Danilov, Nabokov, and so many others do.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. Plus Danilov is a friend.

Up Next: My next attempt to chip away at my backlog…

Yasnaya Polyana Award Finalists for 2022

Well, I’m back, with a very belated post about the Yasnaya Polyana Award shortlist! I suppose it’s fitting that my last post, which is almost two months old, is about the Yasnaya Polyana Award longlist…

Weeks (weeks!), have passed since this year’s YP finalists were announced, so I’ll get right to the list:

• Anastasia Astafyeva’s Для особого случая (maybe something like For a Special Case?) is a collection of short stories. Her surname is familiar because writer Viktor Astafyev is her father. The title story of the collection is here… I’m still meaning to read it and resolve the question of the title!
• Sergei Belyakov’s Парижские мальчики в сталинской Москве (Parisian Boys in Stalinist Moscow) is apparently exactly what it purports to be: nonfiction about Parisian men (including Marina Tsvetaeva’s son, Georgy Yefron) and their life and times in Stalinist Moscow. This book is a Big Book finalist, too.
• Dmitry Danilov’s Саша, привет! (Hey, Sasha!) (text) is the only book on the list that I’ve read in full. Danilov is a friend and a perennial favorite writer, and Hey, Sasha! is one of my favorite Danilov books. Hey, Sasha! concerns a man who’s committed a moral crime and is being punished in an odd way. Everything about the book hit me just right: form, content, and absurdity. And it just keeps feeling truer and truer… Sasha is also a Big Book finalist.
• Kanta Ibragimov’s Маршал (The Marshal but not really…) takes place over nearly five or six decades, examining the deportation of Chechens to Central Asia and their subsequent return to Chechnya… as well as one figure’s (frequent?) dancing of the lezginka, which he calls the “marshal,” which (according to a reader’s review on LitRes) means “freedom” in Chechen. (In googling, I find “marsho” for “freedom” but maybe there’s some nuance to this, a different ending/suffix for the name of the dance?) It sounds like this book is nonfiction. (I find the publisher’s description a bit confusing!)
• Anna Matveeva’s Каждые сто лет (Every Hundred Years) is told by two women in two different centuries; both keep diaries. And of course they will somehow meet.
• Islam Khanipaev’s Типа я (Like, Me, perhaps?) was a NOSE Award finalist in 2021 and NatsBest finalist in 2022: it’s another diary, this time written by an eight-year-old boy.
• Finally, Ivan Shipingóv’s Stream (Стрим) sounds like a polyphonic, “verbatim” book about life among young (Russian) adults. Given that Shipingov is a screenwriter, this may be a book where the verbatim approach actually works. Stream has been waiting in my book cart for all too long – more than a year? – though I can still honestly say I’m looking forward to reading it.

The winners will be announced on September 16. I’m hoping to post about some books before then… This has been my Year of Unexpected Events and the most recent installment, several weeks ago, included major surgery for one of our cats. Fortunately it finally feels like things are starting to return to some semblance of normal (or maybe “normal”?) at our house. I learned all sorts of interesting things from this episode of Diary of a Cat Mom. Top revelation: Cellar crickets, Edwina’s favorite prey and snack, are now forbidden because they can carry nasty parasites that wreak havoc on a cat’s stomach! It was also interesting to hear from Edwina’s surgeon that Edwina won’t miss her spleen. For now, I’m crossing my fingers for quieter times so I can start some new projects, catch up on my reading (so many books! like Stream!), and take on some of the household and office chores that were postponed while I was caring for Edwina. I hope you, too, are enjoying the end of the summer.

Up Next: Danilov’s Hey, Sasha! And a slew of other books…

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. Plus knowing several of the YP jurors, including Otroshenko and Vodolazkin, both of whom I have translated. Danilov is a friend.

Déjà Vu All Over Again: The 2022 Yasnaya Polyana Longlist

Another week, another award list. And another award list – this time it’s the Yasnaya Polyana longlist – that repeats many of the nominees found on previous award lists. But I shrug my shoulders (yet again!) since, well, awards and juries do what they do. Which is fine.

And so. This list contains thirty-seven books that fit many of the usual patterns. Thirteen of the titles (just over one third) were written by women. Twelve of them were published by Elena Shubina’s imprint at AST. Six of the thirty-seven books – by Belyakov, Danilov, Yermakov, Mamedov, Matveeva, and Sinitskaya – are on the 2022 Big Book shortlist. One – Shipingóv’s Stream (Стрим) – was shortlisted for the 2021 NatsBest and NOSE awards. Islam Khanipaev’s Типа я (Like, Me, perhaps?) was a 2021 NOSE finalist and a 2022 NatsBest finalist, though, alas, that NatsBest prize will never be awarded. And Yevgenia Nekrasova won the regional (“wanderer”) NOSE award for Кожа (Skin). I’m sure there are other repeaters that I could mention.

There are lots of other familiar names on the list: Alexander Ilichevsky, Andrei Volos, Alexander Snegirev, and Alla Gorbunova… But there are also a few names I’d never heard. And since the new-to-me writers (and publishers, too) are what I enjoy most about longlists, I’ll mention a few that arouse my curiosity:

• Sakhib Shikhmirzaeva’s В ритме гоор (In the Goor Rhythm? “goor” is an Avar dance) sounds like a family saga set in Dagestan. Shikhmirzaeva mentions in an interview that Vladislav Otroshenko, a YP juror and one of my authors, admired the book early on.
• Denis Sobelyov’s Воскрешение (Resurrection) sounds like an epic of a historical novel (928 pages!), looking at a brother and sister during the 1980s and 1990s (plus perhaps family history?) with settings all around the world.
• Anastasia Astafyeva’s Для особого случая (maybe something like For a Special Case?) is a collection of short stories. Her surname is familiar because writer Viktor Astafyev is her father. The title story of the collection is here… may I’ll read it and resolve the question of the title!
• Artem Lyakhovich’s Логово Змиево (The Zmiev Lair or somesuch, since Zmiev is apparently a toponym) sounds like a fantasy novel about a pianist who’s so caught up in his own world that he doesn’t notice a coup. Lyakhovich is a Ukrainian writer (primarily of children’s books – he’s won three Kniguru awards) and, yes, a pianist, too.

On that happy note, I’ll remind you that you can find this list of books on the Yasnaya Polyana site (with links to descriptions that are far better than mine!), here.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. Two of “my” authors are jurors for this award. I know some of the authors on the list.

Up Next: Yes, I will get to the books I’ve read! (I’d planned to start on that today… but then came this list.) Maybe I’ll start with the two on this list that I’ve read in full: Danilov’s Hey, Sasha! and Bogdanova’s Season of Poisoned Fruits. Both are very good.

Awards Galore: Yasnaya Polyana Winners & NOS(E) Finalists

Well, I sure have a lot of catching up to do in November! So I’ll start the month with a combipost listing this year’s Yasnaya Polyana Award winners and the finalists for the 2021-22 NOS(E) season. And so…

German Sadulaev won the Yasnaya Polyana jury’s contemporary Russian prose award for his Готские письма (literally Goth Letters/Writings), which has been described as a “conceptual collection” (“концептуальный сборник”) and sounds like it does, indeed, contain stories, historical essays (he writes about ancient Goths), and other materials. Meanwhile, Marina Stepnova won the reader’s choice prize for her Сад (The Garden). I’ve read a large chunk and translated a (much smaller) chunk. This excellent piece by Yevgenia Lisitsyna for Gorky Media explains, beautifully, what it feels like to read the book. Finally, Julian Barnes’s Nothing To Be Frightened Of, in a translation by Dmitry Simanovsky and Sergei Polotovsky, won the foreign literature award.

As for the 2021-22 NOS(E) Award, here’s the ten-book shortlist. I didn’t find anything very surprising here and was pleased to see a couple familiar books make the finals. Winners will be announced in early 2022.

• Oksana Vasyakina’s Рана (The Wound) is one of the two books on the list that I’ve already read in full. Vasyakina’s account of traveling with her mother’s ashes, while considering her relationship with her mother, her own sexuality, and her own writing, is interesting, touching, satisfying, and almost suspenseful. Rightfully a finalist for both NOS(E) and Big Book.
• I’m now reading Olga Medvedkova’s Три персонажа в поисках любви и бессмертия (Three Characters/Personages in Search of Love and Immortality), though, well, I’m really only sort of reading since I set it aside after enjoying the first personage’s story – the account of a medieval princess is serenely chilling – so much that I didn’t want to disturb the mood. That said, I’m eager to meet the next two personages.
• Evgenia Nekrasova’s Кожа (Skin) is written in serial form; it’s about two women: a Black slave and a white serf.
• I have Valery Pecheikin’s Злой мальчик (Mean/Nasty/Evil Boy – cover art is a snake) in my book cart but haven’t yet read it. It’s slender, with large print and brief vignettes/stories, and it looks like I’ll enjoy it… but I think I’ve been (subconsciously) saving it for when I really need something easy to read in very small chunks. Pecheikin works at Gogol Center.
• Alexei Polyarinov’s Риф (The Reef) is the second book on this list that I’ve read in full; it’s also a Big Book finalist. Polyarinov offers up three plot lines that come together as he tells of a cult. I have mixed feelings about this page-turner, though it did keep me reading.
• In its briefest description, Artyom Serebryakov’s Фистула (Fistula) sounds like a novel about “forbidden love” between siblings but a more detailed account on Прочтение discusses literary heritage, which sounds (no surprise here!) far more complex.
• Andrei Tomilov’s Тайга далекая (The Distant Taiga) is a collection of short stories.
• Islam Khanipaev’s Типа я (The first-person narrator constantly uses “типа,” which is like “like,” so maybe Like, Me or something similar, though this title makes my head ache!) is the diary of an eight-year-old boy trying to figure out the world.
• Ivan Shipnigֶóv’s Стрим (Stream) was a 2021 NatsBest finalist, so I’ll recycle, yet again, that description: [Stream] sounds like a polyphonic, “verbatim” book about life among young (Russian) adults. Given that Shipnigov is a screenwriter, this may be a book where the verbatim approach actually works.
• I included Roman Shmarakov’s Алкиной (Alcinous, I think) in my Big Book longlist post so will recycle that description again, too. The book is set in the fourth century, in the late Roman Empire. Although it’s apparently often described as a “philological novel,” Artyom Roganov’s review for Gorky Media says it’s more. (And even cites humor! We enjoy humor!)

Up next: Another combipost – about Vasyakina’s The Wound and Polyarinov’s The Reef – that I’m ashamed to admit I already wrote but have yet to finalize and post. (That’s what October was like!) A forthcoming novel by Dmitry Danilov. And maybe a bit on the Dyachenkos’ sequel to Vita Nostra (previous post).

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. I received PDF’s of The Wound and The Reef from Big Book and a PDF of Three Personages from the author’s literary agency but have been doing my reading with print books I purchased. My print copy of the Pecheikin book came from publisher Inspiria.

The 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Award Shortlist

I was planning to blog today about a book (a book I actually read!) but then I saw that the Yasnaya Polyana Award announced their 2021 shortlist. All the better for the last day of an extra-long holiday weekend. Yasnaya Polyana will announce this year’s winners in late October.

Here’s the list. Three of YP’s seven finalists overlap with the Big Book Award’s 2021 finalists:

• Maksim Gureev’s Любовь Куприна (Lyubov Kuprina) is apparently a long story/novella about writer Alexander Kuprin and his mother.
• Maya Kucherskaya’s Лесков. Прозеванный гений (Leskov. The Missed/Overlooked Genius – I almost want to say something like “slept through” or “yawning” to capture the sense of sleeping!) is a big (656 pages, 668 grams) book about Nikolai Leskov. My life is embarrassingly under-Leskoved but, inspired by factors including Languagehat’s posts about Leskov and, subsequently, some personalized reading recommendations plus my own impressions after reading “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” back in my first youth, I’m looking forward to letting Kucherskaya, a kind person and a good reader, guide me to and through more Leskov.
• Dmitrii Likhanov’s Звезда и крест (Star and Cross) apparently has two temporal settings: ancient Antioch and the Soviet-Afghan War.
• Natalia Repina’s Жизнеописание Льва (Lev: A Life) is the only book on the list that I’ve read in full (previous post) thus far. It still tugs at me.
• German Sadulaev’s Готские письма (literally Goth Letters/Writings) is described as a “conceptual collection” (“концептуальный сборник”) and sounds like it includes stories, historical essays (he writes about ancient Goths), and other materials.
• Marina Stepnova’s Сад (The Garden) is also on the Big Book shortlist. I’ve read a large chunk and translated a (much smaller) chunk. I’m looking forward to reading it on paper: this is the sort of book that doesn’t really work for me on an ereader, thanks to either the nineteenth-century setting or the stylized language. Or (more probably) both.
• Leonid Yuzefovich’s Филэллин (The Philhellene) is on the Big Book shortlist, too. This novel’s characters converse through journals, letters, and mental conversations. Yuzefovich’s own back-cover description refers to the novel as being closer to “variations on historical themes than a traditional historical novel.” This is one of those books where I’ve purposely avoided learning too much before reading.
  

Disclaimers and disclosures: The usual. Two of my authors are on the YP jury. I’ve translated two of Stepnova’s novels (plus an excerpt from The Garden) and know several other writers on this list.

Up Next: The Dyachenkos’ The Ritual, Alexei Polyarinov’s The Reef, and Oksana Vasyakina’s The Wound.

The 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Award Longlist

Well how about that? Somehow I’d completely forgotten the Yasnaya Polyana Award longlist was on the way… and then there it was, announced, earlier this week. There are 45 books on the list; roughly half are somehow familiar (even very familiar) but the rest are somehow new to me. Which is why I so love longlists, something I seem to say over and over...

First off: seven of the books and authors on the list coincide with the 2021 Big Book Award shortlist (last week’s post): Yury Buida’s Сады Виверны (The Wyvern’s Gardens), Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Кока (Koka), Maya Kucherskaya’s Лесков. Прозёванный гений (Leskov. The Missed Genius (almost in the sense of “the one who got away,” albeit with a sleepy tinge)), Alexei Polyarinov’s Риф (The Reef), Viktor Remizov’s Вечная мерзлота (Permafrost), Marina Stepnova’s Сад (The Garden), and Leonid Yuzefovich’s Филлэлин (The Philhellene). Mikhail Elizarov’s Земля (Earth) (previous post) won the 2020 National Bestseller Award and was a 2020 Big Book finalist.

There are other familiar names on the list – German Sadulaev, Alla Gorbunova, and Shamil Idiatullin are but a few – though I’ve only read two books on the list: the afore-mentioned Earth and Sergei Lebedev’s Дебютант, a very absorbing thriller with parallel plotlines and timelines that’s known in English, in Antonina Bouis’s translation for New Vessel Press, as Untraceable. I’ve read chunks of Stepnova’s book as well as Sergei Samsonov’s Высокая кровь (High Blood); I translated samples from both. On another note: roughly a third of the authors on the list are women. Among them are Vera Bogdanova and Elena Posvyatovskaya, whose Павел Чжан и прочие речные твари (Pavel Zhang and Other River Creatures) and Важенка (Vazhenka), respectively, are already either in my book cart or on order.

So now the especially fun part: a few unfamiliar authors and titles that sound promising and are already available in book form:

• Keren Klimovski’s Время говорить (Time to Speak?) is set in Israel in the late 1990s and early 2000s, combining genres (detective, family, journey) as it tells of a teenage girl whose parents divorce.
• Given the dearth of information about it and Google’s habit of bringing up stories about (presumably wooly?) mammoths, I’ll let Evgeny Mamontov’s Музыка в аэропорту (Airport Music) remain a mystery. Particularly since I haven’t been in an airport in ages…
• Natalia Repina’s Жизнеописание Льва (The Story of Lev’s Life) is on order; it’s a book about a young man who’s a librarian. Set in Moscow and Peredelkino.
• And, since I can’t find a fourth book that’s utterly unfamiliar as well as appealing, here’s a bit of a cheat that truly does sound good: Olga Medvedkova’s Три персонажа в поисках любви и бессмертия (Three Characters in Search of Love and Immortality), which I have a PDF copy of thanks to Medvedkova’s literary agency, Elkost. No wonder Medvedkova’s name sounded familiar!

Disclaimers and disclosures: The usual. I’ve translated excerpts from several of the books on this list and received books, virtual and print, from their publishers and agents. I’ve also translated books by two of the award’s jurors. 

Up next: Svetlana Kuznetsova’s The Anatomy of the Moon and Alexander Pelevin’s Pokrov-17.