New Russian-to-English Translations Published in 2024

The promised Friday afternoon update: 

The final tally, as of January 3, is 32 books. (If, that is, I counted correctly!) That’s the same number we ended up with last year. And it’s a pleasant surprise. 

This year’s titles are so self-explanatory that the list doesn’t require much analysis. Perhaps what interests me most about this year’s list is something else that comes as no surprise at all: the fact that so many of the books are somehow connected with Ukraine and that so few are contemporary fiction. Once again, there are lots of classics on the list and it’s nice to see a couple of children’s books. Of these 32 titles, 19 were written by men, 12 by women, and one by a large selection of poets. 

My usual cautions remain so I’ll just copy last year’s, with a small edit:

As for disclaimers, caveats, and other details, I’m sure I missed some books, perhaps even a lot of books. As in years past, I’ve included books of all genres and ages. Please add a comment or e-mail me with changes/errors or additions; my address is on the sidebar. NB: Though I generally list only new translations (including retranslations), I do occasionally allow a few reprints and reissues. I’ll place a link to this post on the sidebar of the blog for easy future reference. I’m already taking names and titles for 2025, so please start sending them in. Finally, don’t forget the Self-Published Translation post, here: If you have a book to include, please add it in a comment on that page and I’ll be happy to approve it.

I clearly still have not started posting regularly again, though I thought a lot in 2024 about options for doing so. Nothing, however, felt quite right, though who knows when I might read a book that tells me I need to return to regular blogging... Whether I do or not, I want to thank all of you (yet again) for reading my Lizok posts. I also want to repeat something I wrote on New Year’s Eve in 2023: Meetings with many of you, be they in person, in Zoom meetings, or over email, are part of the pleasure of being a translator.  

Thank you for that. Again, here’s wishing you lots of good reading in 2025!

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And so, another year, another list of translations! I’m doing something a bit different this year: I’m posting the entries that I have today – and wishing you a happy (still-not-quite-here-in-my-time-zone) 2025 – but I’ll finish the list by Friday. This 2024^th year has been full of surprises right up until the very end so checking the rest of the publishers on my list has been the last thing on my mind! It’s hard to say how much I’ll find given that there are already nearly 30 titles on the list and last year’s total was 33.

If you’re a translator, writer, publisher, or other interested party who has a book to add to the list, please either email me (see sidebar for address) or add a comment and I’ll be sure to include the book.

And so (take two!), I’m off for now, to eat, read, and sit by the fire. I’ll add more entries as well as a bit of analysis (though I think the trends are pretty clear this year) and my “usual cautions” for the list within the next few days!

Here’s wishing everyone good health, good reading, and a more peaceful world in 2025.

Here’s the list of translations for 2024:

Aylisli, Akram: People & Trees: A Trilogy, translated by Katherine E. Young; Plamen Press.

Buzina, Varvara: Far & Away: Tales from Rural Russia, translated by Liv Bliss; Russian Life. With illustrations by Asya Lisina.

Ehrenburg, Ilya: Babi Yar and Other Poems, translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya; Smokestack Books, March 2024.

Fadeeva, Olga: Water: Discovering the Precious Resource All Around Us, translated by Lena Traer; Eerdman’s Books for Young Readers.

Gogol, Nikolai: And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon, translated by Oliver Ready; Pushkin Press.

Gordeeva, Katerina: Take My Grief Away: Voices from the War in Ukraine, translated by Lisa C. Hayden; Penguin Random House (imprint: WH Allen).

Gorky, Maxim and Scherr, Barry P.: The Old Man and The Counterfeit Coin: Two Plays, translated by Barry P. Scherr; Slavica Publishers. Slavica lists this as Scherr’s book but two plays is enough for me to put it on the list under Gorky (this is a translation list, after all!) along with Scherr’s name.

Ivanov, Alexei: The Food Block, translated by Richard Coombes; Glagoslav.

Khlebnikov, Velimir and Apollinaire, Guillaume: Birds, Beasts and a World Made New, translated by Robert Chandler; Pushkin Press.

Kurkov, Andrey: The Silver Bone, translated by Boris Dralyuk; MacLehose Press.

Luboshinsky, Vera: The Indian Diary of Vera Luboshinsky (1938-1945), edited and translated by Dušan Deák and Rowenna Baldwin; Oxford University Press.

Navalny, Alexei: Patriot, translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Daiziel; Penguin Random House (imprint: Bodley Head).

Panaeva, Avdotya: The Talnikov Family, translated by Fiona Bell; Columbia University Press. I have a copy of The Talnikov Family and need to get on it, particularly since Fiona Bell’s translation looks very good.

Panyushkin, Valery: Displaced: Civilians in the Russia-Ukraine War, translated by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner; Europa Editions.

Pereverzin, Vladimir: The Prisoner: Behind Bars in Putin’s Russia, translated by Anna Gunin; Gemini Books/Ad Lib Publishers.

Podoroga, Valery: Mimesis: The Literature of the Soviet Avant-Garde, translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov; Verso.

Pushkin, Alexander: The Queen of Spades, translated by Anthony Briggs; Pushkin Press.

Rafeyenko, Volodymyr: The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad, translated by Sibelan Forrester; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. (Rafeyenko now writes in Ukrainian.)

Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail: Foolsburg: The History of a Town, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; Vintage (Penguin Random-House). (This is the novel known as simply История одного города, literally The History of a Town, in Russian.)

Samarqandi, Shahzoda: Mothersland, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega; Three String Books/Slavica Publishers. Mothersland was written in Tajik and Shelley translated the book from Yultan Sadykova’s “lyrical Russian” (as the book’s “about the translators” section calls it) translation of the book, titled Земля матерей. (This is another book that I have and need to finally read!)

Shaloshvili, Natalia: Miss Leoparda, translated by Lena Traer; Enchanted Lion Books. 

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4, translated by Marian Schwartz; University of Notre Dame Press.

Sorokin, Vladimir: Blue Lard, translated by Max Lawton; New York Review Books.

Sorokin, Vladimir: Red Pyramid: Selected Stories, translated by Max Lawton, New York Review Books.

Stiazhkina, Olena: Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary, translated by Anne O. Fisher; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Stiazhkina, Olena: Cecil the Lion Had to Die, translated by Dominique Hoffman; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. (This book apparently begins in Russian and ends in Ukrainian.) Bonus: Here’s an interview with Olena Stiazhkina, thanks to PEN America.

Tsvetaeva, Marina: Three by Tsvetaeva, translated by Andrew Davis; New York Review Books. 

Tsvetaeva, Marina: The Scale By Which You Measure Me: Poems 1913-1917, translated by Christopher Whyte; Shearsman Books. 

Teffi: And Time Was No More, translated by Robert Chander; Pushkin Press.

Various: Dislocation: An Anthology of Poetic Response to Russia’s War in Ukraine, edited by Julia Nemirovskaya and Anna Krushelnitskaya; Slavica Publishers. Translators Maria Bloshteyn, Andrei Burago, Richard Coombes, Yana Kane, Dmitry Manin, and Josephine von Zitzewitz also worked on this bilingual edition. Thank you to Asymptote for publishing this piece about Dislocation. I attended an online reading earlier this year and it was painful, very moving.

Various: Lectures on Analytical Mechanics, translated by O.V. Karpushina and V.G. Serbo; Oxford University Press. We cover all genres here! The authors are G.L. Kotkin, V.G. Serbo, and A.I. Chernykh.

Zavalinsky, Igor: A Dream of Annapurna, translated by Michael and Jonathan Pursglove; Glagoslav.

 

Disclaimers and Disclosures. The usual. I know many of the translators, authors, and publishers whose work is on this list. Some of these books were provided to me by publishers, authors, literary agents.

London Book Fair 2019 Trip Report, the No-Notes-Means-Minimal-Substance Edition

That’s right: I took no notes at any of the events I attended or participated in during the week of the London Book Fair. I slacked. I’ve pieced together a bit, though, based on memory…

I suppose I have a bit of an excuse for shirking during the first event I attended, since it took place roughly twelve hours after landing at Gatwick and roughly thirty hours after my last real (lying in a bed) sleep. The event was a book club meeting with Alexei Salnikov, who discussed his Отдел (The Department) at the Waterstones/Piccadilly store. In some ways, jetlag was the ideal state for me to be in since I hadn’t yet read the book and didn’t want spoilers; thanks to jetlag, there was no need to tune anything out! Now that I’ve read the book, I think that attending without really processing the conversation was perfect. Among other things, I probably would have disbelieved what people said about The Department. And attending without really listening/retaining fits beautifully with the novel’s absurdity. As did the intensity and urgency of the conversation, which I (think I) do remember. I’ll be writing about the book soon and will only add for now that the book was deeply unsettling in all the right ways. So I loved it.

Thank goodness for real sleep: Day Two included two events! A translation roundtable at the Russian stand brought together eight translators, moderated by Hamid Ismailov, whose The Devils’ Dance, translated by Donald Rayfield with John Farndon, recently won the EBRD Literature Prize.

Photo: Anastasia Kornienko

Here we are, left to right: Donald Rayfield, Robert Chandler, me (I was cold, not critical!), Oliver Ready, Hamid Ismailov, Alexander Chantsev, Arch Tait, Ola Wallin, and Carol Ermakova. I remember a few things: mentioning my translation of Margarita Khemlin’s Klotsvog for the Russian Library and saying that I look for books that I enjoyed reading and think I will enjoy translating – I see having fun as a critical part of the process. Also: Donald Rayfield learned Uzbek to translate The Devils’ Dance and Carol Ermakova spoke of her translations of Elena Chizhova’s novels. Other details are too murky to mention since I don’t want to get anything wrong or, heaven forbid, start rumors. Day Two also brought me back to Waterstones: Guzel Yakhina spoke, primarily about her Zuleikha, which recently came out in my translation for Oneworld Publications. I talked for a short bit about the translation, addressing (Ура, I remember this part!) how we handled the Tatar words in the Russian text: transliterating and italicizing those that the text already explained, but just translating the rest. This was a lucky case where the Russian text held the perfect solution.

The evening of Day Three took me to Pushkin House for a screening of the first episode of the series Хребет России (The Ridge of Russia), about the Urals, followed by Q&A with author Alexei Ivanov and moderator Anastasia Koro. Thank goodness there’s information here, on the Pushkin House site, about the event and how everything (and everybody) fits together! Tales of Yermak were particularly memorable, though the linguist in me was most fascinated that Ivanov and TV guy Leonid Parfyonov, who’s also part of this road-trip-esque series, stressed different syllables in the plural of the word for Cossack. This struck me because a friend has noted a couple of times that she prefers the stress as казáки; I’d been stressing endings. (There’s lots on the Internet about this stressful topic, here, for example. Fear not: basically, either way is fine. Ozhegov and my two orthographical dictionaries also show stress patterns both ways for the plural, with the root endings as second choice.) Bonus: Yulia Zaitseva, who’s also in the series (she even hang glides!), was in attendance at Pushkin House, too.

Day Four was especially eventful for a roundtable I participated in with Guzel Yakhina, literary agent Julia Goumen, and Glagoslav editor Ksenia Papazova: “Women in Literature & Translation: Realities and Stereotypes,” moderated by Daniel Hahn. There were so many subtopics that it’s very hard to summarize, let alone offer much context, but things began with a brief talk from Guzel during which, among other things, she talked about Zuleikha and said she’d never felt she’d been discriminated against for being a woman. We ended with audience questions, including one from a man who’s interested in translating a woman author. (I hope his project works out!) Other topics included book covers, author age, and specific writers, including Valentina Nazarova, Elena Chizhova, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. I talked about the role translators, particularly women, can/should take in working toward ensuring more women’s books are translated and published, noting that since more women writers tend to be translated by women than men (during Q&A, though, I made sure to give men their due and specifically mentioned Arch Tait, whose authors I didn’t list; they include Ulitskaya and Alexievich, among others) we need to actively read, scout, and properly pitch projects if we want to close the gap. (For some stark statistics on how few translated books are written by women, please see this interview with Chad Post from the London Show Daily for 14 March 2019.) I seem to recall repeating that plenty of Russian women are writing high-quality books that deserve to be translated, adding “It’s only fair!” several times. Post-LBF, my biggest hope is that more (“all” is probably asking too much!) translators, agents, scouts, publishers, and others in the industry – men or women – will think more about these disparities when they read, research, and consider projects. Our choices and decisions matter. My reward for finishing my events

Mushy peas, no thanks. Photo: Ilona Chavasse

during the trip was a hot lunch – an old favorite, fish and chips! – with translator colleague and friend Ilona Chavasse (translator of, among others, Yuri Rytkheu – their A Dream in Polar Fog awaits me…), who stealthily immortalized my meal when I stepped away from the table for a minute. The perfect capper to the book fair was Chris Gribble’s half-hour “in conversation” Q&A with Jeremy Tiang, LBF’s first-ever Literary Translator of the Fair. And an excellent choice he was: he’s a thoughtful speaker and I particularly appreciate the wisdom, gentle humor, and love with which he speaks about the realities of literary translation. In an interview with Michelle Johnson of World Literature Today, he said something that I think particularly deserves to be read, remembered, and repeated, repeated, repeated: “Literary translators are artists in our own right. Treat us as partners in a creative process, not functionaries. We have a lot to offer.”

And that’s about it for public events! I did bring home piles of books, most in English… I’m currently enjoying Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk in Sora Kim-Russell’s translation (after loving Hye-young Pyun’s The Hole in Kim-Russell’s translation, this one called out to me, then turned up on the international Booker longlist later in the week!) and have plenty more on the shelves, including Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, in Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, and Frank Wynne’s translation of Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex 2, which I just had to buy after reading VS 1 last year, thanks to the good people of Despentes’s UK publisher, MacLehose Press, who gave me a copy at the Frankfurt book fair. VS 1 is apparently on the way to the US in late 2019, from FSG.

Disclaimers, Disclosures, and Thanks: The usual. Thank you to Read Russia for bringing me to the London Book Fair and giving me books, too!

Up Next: Salnikov’s The Department, which may take a bit of time to process and come to terms with, thanks to a powerful combination of absurdity, unease, tension, and even coziness. The NatsBest shortlist. And then another book. It’s hard to know what to read after The Department.

Switched at Birth: Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped

It’s taken me a month or two to get up the gumption to write about Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Нас украли, история преступлений (Kidnapped. The History of Crimes) but that’s less a factor of the love/hate spectrum (I’m on the really-liked-to-loved end) than of the simple fact that it’s very hard to describe. Sometimes time smooths over the complications, leaving contours that are helpful in writing meaningful summaries. We’ll hope that’s the case with Kidnapped, though I fear I’ve failed us all, including the book. I think the best way to do the novel justice is to suggest that you read the summary I linked to above, on the English-language title, since Petrushevskaya’s literary agents offer an excellent plot outline. And I’ll attempt to address some of what struck me most.

The novel begins with two young men bearing nearly identical passports – their names and birth dates are the same – flying off from Moscow to Montegasko. (Or maybe Montegasco, that’s more pleasing to the eye, isn’t it?) “Doesn’t exist,” I wrote in the right margin with “not typical kids” at the bottom of the page. We already have mysterious doubles (cue up “switched at birth” plus a mother’s death in childbirth and a fictitious family situation to satisfy bureaucracy) and a faraway, make-believe place. Petrushevskaya is already telling yet more scary fairy tales, this time about brothers who are both lucky and unlucky, not to mention about horrendous relatives to escape, magically good developments, and Soviet bureaucracy. As well as multiple mentions of Lloyd’s of London, thanks to the sinking of a ship during the “бешеные” nineties, years that are, literally speaking here, “rabid,” though we might call them “frenzied,” “mad,” and/or “violent” since the nineties, the age of vouchers, were basically was a horrible shipwreck for so many.

Petrushevskaya doesn’t focus solely on the boys, though: we get lots of backstory about their families, some of it told in chapters that read almost as set pieces detailing family abuse and abuses of power, as in the case of unscrupulous hospital workers. I could probably write this post as a list of tropes, many of them thoroughly bared: lonesome princess, foundling who will live like a king, a character feeling alone in the world and wanting to go to Moscow, and even an outright mention (in dialogue) of the sense of a soap opera involving babies switched at birth. And then there are all the sociocultural and sociopolitical myths and mores, with mentions of Soviet-era diplomatic ways (I loved the interrupted line, “And we, simple Soviet diplomats…”), the KGB, and the trauma of changing times, like those afore-mentioned nineties. I give Petrushevskaya particularly high marks for writing an ending that was so funny that I completely forgot what happened: beyond noting stereotypes about Russian life (vodka included, of course), there are interrogations (with lie detector) where Petrushevskaya notes an interpreter’s infelicities. It’s great stuff.

The strangest, scariest, and most magical part of all this is that Petrushevskaya somehow or other makes everything fit together and read as a real novel. Referring to some sort of literary alchemy or sorcery is perhaps most fitting since she seems to do the impossible, blending so many storylines, genres (the back cover’s statement from Petrushevskaya mentions detective novels), characters, locations, ways of life, and myths into a relatively seamless novel, a book that kept pulling me along. It kept me up at night, and even, yes, made me laugh out loud. It’s Petrushevskaya’s finessed hodgepodge of familiar elements and odd surprises that makes the book read so well – there’s something masterful in how she refreshes old stories in Kidnapped, using her distinctive style and contemporary twists as she toys with her material and characters. Her NOS(E) award, from the panel of critics, was thoroughly deserved. I think it’s time to reread her Время Ночь (The Time: Night).

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up Next: London Book Fair trip report. And then a book that I won’t name, lest I jinx myself yet again. I’ve done a lot of required and recommended reading in recent months but am very happy to be back to free reading now!

ASEEES: My Happy Boston Slavist Convention Travel (Late Again!)

I’ve already established in multiple “Up Next” notes that last December’s Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) conference convention was “ridiculously fun,” which was probably a dangerous thing to write since I’m no David Lodge. Nothing wacky happened (I didn’t shop at the hotel convenience store) and I left for home before the Saturday night dance party started, though I saw a tweet about it on the bus ride from Boston. “Bus ride” hardly sounds like a synonym for “fun times” either but, well, the two-hour trip did not induce jetlag. Then again, there’s something to be said for the nervous energy that comes with a transatlantic plane flight. (Hello, London Book Fair!) In any case, ASEEES was particularly fun because, with thousands of Slavists in attendance I saw colleagues – both in pre-arranged and chance meetings – from all stages of my Russian studies life, from grad school decades ago to my Moscow years and my current incarnation as a translator. There’s something oddly comforting about that: things change, things stay the same, things are enjoyable. As even convention panels sometimes are, too. I’ll start with highlights of Russian literature panels.

• The first panel I attended was on the legacy of Vladimir Makanin, where I took particular interest in hearing Byron Lindsey, who has translated Makanin (here’s a story), speak about knowing him, Vladimir Ivantsov speak about teaching him, and Irina Anisimova speak about Makanin’s Asan – I share Anisimova’s views of the narrative’s shortcomings and dead-end/failed plotlines. Since I was the only spectator at this panel (I’d heard this often happens at ASEEES), it was nice to join in the conversation after the papers.
• A panel called “The Poetics of Space in Post-Soviet Fiction,” chaired by Sibelan Forrester, covered some familiar territory, too. I was sorry to miss Sofya Khagi speaking about Pelevin, Bykov, and Ilichevsky, but glad to catch Keith Livers’s paper on Alexander Prokhanov’s The Murder of Cities if only because I seem to recall someone thanking Livers for reading Prokhanov so others don’t have to. I’ve never read Prokhanov but after scribbling “signature motif of dismemberment,” in quotation marks, hmm, perhaps I should be thankful, too. Given my own reading and translation work, Muireann Maguire’s paper on Vladimir Sharov’s Before and During and Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator felt, of course, the most familiar and relevant – I loved hearing her speak about elements of clinical confinement, transitional spaces, and historiography. (I’d go on but don’t want to give away The Aviator’s big spoiler!)
• I heard more discussion of contemporary fiction in a panel called “Russia’s History as Battlefield: Ideology, Politics, and the Response of Literature,” chaired by Dirk Uffelmann and with discussant Boris Noordenbos, who (according to my marginalia) studies conspiracy theories. Stehn Aztlan Mortensen spoke about Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria, seeing Sorokin as a sort of modern-day Gogol, and Kåre Johan Mjør spoke about contemporary conservative thought, but it was Ingunn Lunde’s discussion of “reimaginations of historical pasts” that particularly hit me because she analyzed many aspects of Mikhail Gigolashvili’s mammoth Mysterious Year, about Ivan the Terrible, covering its structure (one chapter, one day), stylized prose (e.g. mix of high-brow and oral usage), and themes that resonate today, such as Russia and the West, and spiritual and moral values.
• Saturday got off to a great start with “Great Performances of Glasnost”: Breakthrough Events in Soviet-Western Literary Relations in the 80s and 90s, where I was sorry to miss Ellen Chances’s paper but very much enjoyed Carol Ueland’s on “The Arrival of New Soviet Writers, the PEN Readers of 1987, and Joseph Brodsky”; Nadezhda Azhghikina’s reading of (the absent) Natalia Ivanova’s piece about a 1991 conference of Russian women writers and American Slavists; and then discussant Nancy Condee’s wonderfully freewheeling talk about personal experiences living in Moscow during the Soviet period. There was tons to soak up here, particularly the combination of official delegations and personal experiences, all of which brought back lots of perestroika-era memories of visitors to my university, including Anatoly Rybakov, who spoke at my department at a time when, sadly, I hadn’t a clue who he was.

(I realize I’ve established a disgraceful-sounding pattern of missed papers: this is largely because it was difficult to ride the escalator or walk the corridors of the hotel’s conference area – where some conferees conventioneers pretty much set up remote offices in comfortable-looking chairs – without running into anyone familiar that I hadn’t seen in the last hour or thirty years. This was conference culture at its finest.)

• And then there were the split sessions, where I heard most of Eliot Borenstein’s “‘No, You’re the Puppet’: Conspiracy and Agency in the Putin Era,” which was part of a panel on conspiracy theories in post-Soviet Russia and which I couldn’t resist for its discussion of the zombification of consumers of mass media, the passive behavior that results, and the dovetailing with conspiracy theory. Of course my notes on the paper may be garbled since I quickly started thinking more about (damn it!) mobile rabies, free will, race baiting, and the masses in Eduard Verkin’s Sakhalin Island (previous post), a book that, yes, ladies and gentlemen, still pokes at my addled brain cells. In any case, I’m already looking forward to Eliot’s Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism, which you can preview here (scroll down for the beginning!). I also highly recommend Eliot’s “Rereading Akunin” blog posts. Along the way to a theater panel, I resisted the call of Stephen F. Cohen’s familiar voice from a roundtable on “What Did the Soviet Dissident Movement Teach the Field: In Honor of Edward Kline and Valery Chalidze” in favor of arriving in time for Aleksei Semenenko’s paper on Othello.
• The final session I attended, also only in part since I was late-late-late once again, this time thanks to goodbyes, was a roundtable, “Introducing Alternative Perspectives: Women’s Writing in Post-Soviet Russia and Former Socialist Republics,” that included discussion of Nastya Rybka (I think?) and Alisa Ganieva (definitely); chaired by Alisa Rowley, with participants Olga Breininger-Umetayeva, Vasilina Orlova, Aleksandra Simonova, and Susanna Weygandt. I enjoyed hearing their perspectives on feminism, women, and writing, and am very sorry to have missed the beginning.
• My own paper, in a translation stream session about criticism chaired by Emily Finer, discussed online criticism of Russian-to-English translations. I focused on (and offered examples of) approaches that address elements of a translation without nitpicking about individual word choices but manage to find ways to express, in a balanced way, the reviewer’s preferences for a different approach – these sorts of reviews can be wonderfully tactful, constructive, and useful. My co-panelists were Timothy Sergay, with “Can Rejection of ‘Gotcha’ Criticism Be Reconciled with Interlinguistic Scrutiny?: Notes of a Rueful Reviewer of Translations,” and Hannu Kemppanen, whose paper “The Place of Translation in the Target Culture: Book Reviews as an Institution of Translation” (here’s another version of Hannu’s paper) offered a case study of a work of nonfiction by Yuri Komissarov (Deryabin in real life – the author was a Soviet diplomat) that was translated into Finnish and received fifty (!) reviews. Our discussant didn’t come so I somehow made it through my first academic conference without being discussanted. Maybe I’ll experience that dubious pleasure in 2020 in Washington.

I came home before the last day of the convention – I just couldn’t envision such an early Sunday morning – and wound up my ASEEES stay with a Russo-American Poetry Reading session, where highlights included readings by Polina Barskova, Matvei Yankelevich, and Pavel Arseniev. And then I headed off for the bus, towing a little suitcase half-filled with A History of Russian Literature by Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler; and with smaller spaces taken up by Anna Burns’s Milkman, a wonderful colleague’s gift that I loved reading on the treadmill, a little at a time, feeling the rhythms of the skaz narration as I walked; as well as Linor Goralik’s Found Life, a collection of poems, stories, comics, and a play edited by Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, and Maya Vinokour that I’m planning to read chunks of soon alongside a Russian volume with very similar contents.

Up Next: Ludmila Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped. And then something else.

Disclaimers: The usual, plus I’ve known Eliot Borenstein since my Moscow years. Thank you to Columbia University Press’s Russian Library – who will be publishing my translation of Margarita Khemlin’s Klotsvog later this year! – for the copy of the Goralik book. Oxford University Press gave me a generous and much-appreciated discount on A History of Russian Literature.

Putting the Apocalypse in the Post-Apocalyptic: Verkin’s Sakhalin Island

Back in mid-November, I noted that Eduard Verkin’s Остров Сахалин (Sakhalin Island) was confounding me – a month later, with the passage of time, I can’t say I see things much differently. Sakhalin Island is imaginative, action-packed (much of the time), and absorbing, though on a structural level it’s an unholy mess, with an uneasy blend of genres, tropes, motifs, characters, disasters, and just about everything else. Of course I’m more than capable of enjoying and even loving overstuffed books that I describe with terms like “diabolical” and “unholy mess,” so I’m not surprised I never considered abandoning Verkin’s Sakhalin, though the book is trying my meager patience today, as I attempt to mentally list the many plot threads running through the book. And, oops, I didn’t pull nearly hard enough on a key plot thread, the one I found least interesting. Underrating that story line resulted in my feeling a bit lost when I reached the twist-and-everything-changes ending and came up short on meaning. (The twist ending, by the way, reminded me of another island novel, Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island, which also rankled.) I won’t reveal the twist in Sakhalin Island but I will include some minor spoilers in my descriptions of the book.

Yuzho-Sakhalinsk, a favorite place.

So what did I catch and what did I miss? Well, in this world after nuclear war (North Korea started it, the U.S. responded, horror ensued), Japan is the world’s remaining bastion of relative calm and industrialization, and beautiful Sakhalin Island essentially serves as a combination of buffer zone and giant refugee and prison camp. Population: around twenty million. A young woman named Lilac, a student of applied futurology who lives in Japan and is part Russian and part Japanese, travels to Sakhalin to have a look around. She’s armed with pistols, prepared to visit prisons, and planning to somehow learn something about the future, based on the past and present. (Confession: applied futurology and Lilac’s instructions from and discussions of her professor are the plot thread I should have paid more attention to.) Most of the book is told in Lilac’s first-person narrative; her voice is calm, assured, and generally logical, even after she’s begun using those pistols. Seeing that Verkin’s book follows in Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island tracks – many of the same prisons are mentioned and at least one reviewer has noticed similar wording in the two books – it’s only fitting that guns will be fired. Since the island is dangerous, Lilac is assigned a fellow traveler and body guard, Artyom, who is from the “chained to a hook” caste – he carries a large and very lethal weapon. (Verkin also borrows “chained to…” from Chekhov’s findings.)

During their travels together – which begin on a rather luxurious train and end in a stolen boat, with a lot of walking in between – Lilac and Artyom meet some curious figures, including an inmate Lilac remembers hearing at a poetry reading when she was younger, a crawling radical vegan who’s likened to an insect, and a little boy with albinism who has had his tongue and digits removed. Lilac and Artyom take the boy with them on their journey. Verkin also offers up disturbing race-related incidents, descriptions of crazy-making prison architecture, and accounts of what happens to corpses. Though these episodes, many of which are very odd, are important to the story, there’s often too much background information, slowing the pace in a book where seismic activity is most important because it triggers the arrival of a human-made disease known as mobile rabies, MOB, which puts victims into a zombified state that lasts implausibly long.

So, yes, the earthquakes are crucial here, which is why I mentioned “apocalypse” in my title. Not only does earthquake damage release prisoners (including the poet) from jail, it also enables MOB’s zombified (I love that word) victims to cross from the mainland to Sakhalin – on a side note, MOBsters have hydrophobia and avoid stairs, too, which can make retreat easy for the healthy. And so Lilac, Artyom, and the boy are running from rioting prisoners, the MOB ill, and crews they’re sure will come to clean things up after an invasion of zombified MOBsters. If all this sounds like a bit (or a lot) too much, you’re right, it is. And this isn’t the half of it. Even so (or maybe “thus”?), Sakhalin Island got under my skin and by its end, after mentions of an Edenic garden, earthquakes, hellfire, purification, and a second coming, not to mention a unicorn, Sakhalin brought me back to the Bible, to my beloved Book of Revelation. It also brought me to thoughts of innocence (and its loss) among the orphaned – including the maimed boy as well as other children and even adults, including Artyom – plus prisoners, and even Lilac, whose name is so fresh and springy, who wears a protective inherited mackintosh for most of the book, and who almost seems to become a trained assassin. An imperturbable one, too, and no wonder, since danger always lurks and, as a doctor tells her, “Sakhalin is fear. We’re afraid.”

Verkin achieves a lot with Sakhalin Island and my emotions loved it, thanks to my fascination with the Book of Revelation, the very concept of incarceration on an island, the poet (he’s a key figure, pull that thread if you read the book), the various figures chained to objects, the heavy debt to Chekhov (whose Sakhalin I haven’t read but paged through quite a bit), the MOBster zombies who shrink from the stairs our heroes conveniently manage to find, and the awfulness of a world with so much death, doom, destruction, and roasted rat meat. None of that will let me go and, good gracious, part of me wants to reread the book to decipher it. My brain, though, wishes Verkin’s editors hadn’t deserted him: despite her vividness, Lilac’s many prison visits and observations start feeling repetitious and many scenes could have been pared down, while other aspects of the book, like the Japanese poet, the “chained to…” figures, and the relationships between characters felt like they could and should have been given more attention. I realize that Lilac – a social scientist who’s ostensibly writing a trip report but may well be the ultimate unreliable narrator – probably didn’t have enough spare time or emotional energy to take much of that down (even mentally) while escaping earthquakes, riots, and a killer clean-up crew, but a little more balance from Lilac would have meant a better work of fiction for Verkin. I also admit to a bias against being presented with big twists in epilogues – I tend to see them as manipulative. But damn that Verkin, who’s packed so much into this book that I still can’t stop thinking about it, which is, I suppose, a sign that something worked pretty well in Sakhalin Island if the manipulative epilogue trick sucked me in this time around.

Up next: Alisa Ganieva’s Offended Sensibilities and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped. The History of Crimes. Plus a trip report from the ASEEES/Slavist convention, which was ridiculously fun, and a list of translations that came out this year. I’m still taking entries for the list so translators and publishers, please send me a note if you have something to report.

Disclaimers: The usual. I received a copy of Sakhalin Island from Verkin’s literary agency, BGS, with whom I often converse and sometimes collaborate, and whose authors I often seem to translate.

Photo credit: btibbets, via Wikipedia. 

Olga Slavnikova Wins 2018 Yasnaya Polyana Award

The Yasnaya Polyana Award announced 2018 winners last week. Olga Slavnikova’s Прыжок в длину (Long Jump) won the jury award and Maria Stepanova’s Памяти памяти (In Memory of Memory or Post-Memory, as foreign rights holder Suhrkamp calls it) won the readers’ choice prize. Amos Oz and his Russian translator, Viktor Radutskii, won international literature honors for Иуда, which is known as Judas in Nicholas de Lange’s English translation.

Although I was surprised when Long Jump leaped its way to the three-book Yasnaya Polyana shortlist in September, my surprise faded quickly. Long Jump may not be calling out to me from the shelf, begging (Lisa! Lizok, read more of me!) for attention – it’s very densely populated with metaphors, something I find wearying in any language, and the book lacks the sparkle of Slavnikova’s 2017 (previous post) – but I will finish it. And that’s not just because rumor has it there’s a big plot twist on the way. I may not love Long Jump but the book has plenty of interesting elements, including some sharp social commentary. Vladislav Otroshenko, a Yasnaya Polyana juror, has mentioned in award announcements that Long Jump offers a lens for looking at the world and I certainly can’t argue with that. Vlad’s statements last week also assert that Slavnikova’s book (I’ll paraphrase) is the only [award candidate] written as a novel rather than as primitive self-expression and he adds that Slavnikova wrote a book that makes a statement that’s important for humankind. There’s something – a lot, really – to be said for that, and I can’t quibble with his statement, given that he’s looking at universality, something I also value very highly and found way too little of in the books on the YP longlist that I read or (far more frequently) attempted to read.

Even if I have misgivings about Long Jump, they feel purely technical and very overcomable, and they don’t prevent me from respecting Slavnikova’s achievement, which I can sense even without finishing the novel. I feel something more akin to trepidation about the prospect of reading Post-Memory, which I seem to either hear praised as a Very Important Book or dissed as a long and plotless snoozer. I’ve tried, though/therefore, to avoid reading detailed commentary about Post-Memory, lest I be swayed too far in either direction, particularly since I know good readers from both camps. No matter what I end up thinking of Post-Memory – which, of course I’m hoping to enjoy or at least appreciate, something that, yes, can occasionally be possible even with plotless snoozers – I need to get reading it and finishing Long Jump, too. For now, though, I’m feeling pretty entertained by Alexei Vinokurov’s People of the Black Dragon, a novel in stories that’s also a Big Book finalist.

Up Next: Reading roundups for English-language books and Big Book finalists.

Disclaimers: The usual, for the fact that I’ve translated books by two YP jury members and know Slavnikova a bit.

The Tin Foil Hat Crowd: Volos’s Shpakovsky’s Hat

Andrei Volos’s Шапка Шпаковского (Shpakovsky’s Hat) is an odd kind of book, a pleasant-but-serious-too jumble sort of satirical novel that doesn’t always hold together particularly very well for a stickler like me but that reads along nicely enough to finish. I read all 316 pages. The description on the back of the book promises a novel about a novelist, Innokenty Dogavtsev (pseudonym Semyon Sukhotrub), who decides to kill off the unkillable hero of his thriller series, but Shpakovsky’s Hat is more about the absurdities of modern life, both private and public.

Volos tosses so many plot threads and tropes into this brief book that I almost expected to find an essay about kitchen sinks somewhere in the middle. There’s the issue of Sukhotrub’s novel, there’s publisher humor, there are work relationships (one of which, with an Alisa—she’d be Alice in English, like the Wonderland girl—quickly becomes far more personal), there are guy-time outings, there’s a political element, there’s a detainment, there’s freedom, and there’s the question of the many-layered tin foil hats that Shpakovsky (one of the buddies) wears to keep out voices. I sympathize about the hat since heaven only knows there’s way too much background noise in life these days. Full disclosure: I confess to having worn foil hats more than once during my first youth, though only when hennaing my hair.

I could go on and on about bits of humor that I marked—a publisher with big game trophies who proclaims the uselessness of electronic reading devices, a film producer saying any book with a print run lower than 60,000 copies has no propaganda value, etc., etc.—or mention lots of other enjoyable or sad-but-funny bits, but I’m not sure there’s much point. Shpakovsky’s Hat is the sort of book that can be compared to soufflés, meaning that they may be tasty or even yummy, but they’re airy and thus not especially satiating even if there are Big Topics (the flavor of cheese? some bits of bacon? the threat of high cholesterol?) involved. Of course I enjoyed the publishing world chunks most, though hope nobody ever has to go through the contract indignities Dogavtsev-Sukhotrub does.

The most interesting aspect of Shpakovsky’s Hat is that it kept me reading, despite the meandering plot and despite being rather short on Shpakovsky himself, since I think he’s the most interesting character, someone who’s tuned in but wants to tune out. It’s voice—Dogavtsev’s voice—that keeps the book going. His first-person narrative is chatty and humorous, nattering on and on without getting too dull, and, of course, blending in a reference or two to Moscow to the End of the Line for good measure. (Beyond that, NatsBest juror Veronika Kungurtseva’s review notes lots of apparent references to Master and Margarita.) Digging through the book for more notes and details would be completely untrue to my reading, which was, second confession, fairly mindless, which probably means careless. I’d been warned going into Shpakovsky’s Hat that it wasn’t Volos’s best work, though someone who’s been recommending Volos to me for a long time said I’d enjoy it anyway. Yes, I did, even if it felt too loose. (For more, Kelderek’s observations on the book, on the Ozon.ru site, are very, very close to mine.) I have several other Volos books on the shelf so I’m sure there will be more to come.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up next: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, a lovely short story cycle, more books in English, and upcoming award news. I’m still rereading War and Peace, though focusing more on Peace than War this time around (there’s enough chaos in present-day life that the chaos of war in the novel feels a little overwhelming) and still don’t intend to blog about the experience.

The 2016 NOSE Award Longlist

Thank goodness for the NOSE Award longlist! I have to admit that a rainy Saturday and a windy, blustery Sunday weren’t very conducive to writing trip reports or book reports… but an award longlist (oops, almost a “lostlist”) feels like just the thing. And the NOSE Award—a program of the Prokhorov Foundation—is always a quirky matter (I still don’t quite understand the NOSE), whether we’re talking about a longlist, shortlist, or award final, and that makes NOSE all the more appealing today. Beyond that, there’s not much time to post the list: the shortlist is apparently on the express, scheduled for debate and arrival on November 2. So here’s the whole longlist, in the order presented on the Prokhorov Foundation site and with my completely inconsistent transliterations of names:

• Yuri Buida’s Цейлон (Ceylon), which has already hit other longlists and which I’ve read (previous post).
• Eugene Vodolazkin’s Авиатор (The Aviator), which is already on the Big Book shortlist and which I’m already translating and loving all over again (previous post).
• Polina Zherebtsova’s Тонкая серебристая нить (Thin Silver Thread) is a collection of stories about civilian life in Grozny during the Chechen Wars. Brief extracts from Zherebtsova’s diary (NB: this is a different book!).
• Kirill Kobrin’s Шерлок Холмс и рождение современности. Деньги, девушки, денди Викторианской Эпохи (Sherlock Holmes and the Birth of Modernity. Money, Young Women, and Dandies of the Victorian Epoch) is nonfiction that the title and this excerpt explain.
• Sergei Kuznetsov’s Калейдоскоп (excerpt) (Kaleidoscope) involves dozens of characters and their stories, set in the twentieth century; one of my Goodreads friends noted sex and vampires. This one sounded interesting from the start but for some reason hearing it described—in a positive way, mind you—as “Pynchon lite” more than once in Moscow intrigues me all the more.
• Vladimir Martynov’s Книга Перемен (The Book of Changes) is described as more of a palimpsest than a book and as a sort of hypertext for hyperreading that uses zapping and (appropriately enough, I suppose) fortune telling practices from that other The Book of Changes. I was an I Ching fan as a teenager and don’t want to sound dismissive but, hmm.
• Aleksandra Petrova’s Аппендикс (excerpt) (The Appendix, in a metaphorical sense, it seems) is a novel about Rome. (A review)
• Moshe Shanin’s Левоплоссковские. Правоплоссковские (The title refer to residents of the villages of Levoplosskaya and Pravoplosskaya) is a collection of stories written by a young writer—he was a Debut winner for short fiction in 2014—from Severodvinsk, which interests me from the start because of my many visits to Arkhangelsk.
• Vladimir Voinovich’s Малиновый пеликан (excerpt) (The Raspberry Pelican, perhaps referring to the bird’s color, based on the cover…) is more Voinovich satire with absurdity.
• Dmitrii Lipskerov’s О нем и о бабочках (expert from GQ) (Lipskerov reads from the book on YouTube) (About Him and About Butterflies/Moths/Bow Ties, I’m betting on the lepidoptera, based on a reader review and other factors…) seems to be about a man who loses, ahem, intimate anatomy. The GQ excerpt intro compares it to Gogol’s “The Nose,” one of my all-time favorites, and it’s obvious why, even just skimming the excerpt.
• Igor Sakhnovsky’s Свобода по умолчанию (Freedom by Default) is apparently a novel about love, internal freedom, and political absurdity.
• Vasilii Avchenko’s Кристалл в прозрачной оправе (Crystal in a Transparent Frame) carries the subtitle “lyrical lectures about water and stones,” and Avchenko is said to cover many aspects of life in Vladivostok, including fish(ing), as in this excerpt. Ocean lover that I am, I bought this one after it hit the 2016 NatsBest shortlist.
• Aleksei Zikmund’s Карело-финский дневник (Karelian-Finnish Diary) is a bit of a mystery…
• Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Тимошина проза (Timosha’s Prose), which I read and don’t quite know how to describe… it’s a detached but close narrative about a young man. The novel lacks the, hmm, snap and pop (and crackle, too, I suppose) of Zaionchkovsky’s previous books.
• Boris Lego’s Сумеречные рассказы (Dusky Stories) is a collection of nineteen Russian gothic stories; a cover blurb calls it the scariest book of the year…
• Sergei Lebedev’s Люди августа (People of August, click through for synopsis and excerpt) is also on the 2016 Booker shortlist.
• Andrei Shary’s Дунай. Река империй (The Dunai. River of Empires, okay fine, The Danube…) has a lovely cover (I like old maps) and looks at history and the Danube over three millennia.
• Ivan Shipnigov’s Нефть, метель и другие веселые боги (Oil, Blizzard, and Other Cheerful Gods) is a collection of stories in which, according to the publisher, oil is the most cheerful of the Gods or gods, I’m not sure which, particularly since the publisher also compares Shipnigov’s prose to the young Pelevin’s. Here’s a sample story from the collection.

Up Next: Trip reports (Moscow and Oakland), the afore-mentioned Zaionchkovsky book and Alexander Snegirev’s patient Faith/Vera, more award news, and other Big Book finalists, though this second half of the list brings me little joy and much left unfinished…

Disclaimers and disclosures. The usual, plus translating that Vodolazkin book and the fact of support for my translation work from Prokhorov Foundation grants.

Big Book Five: Sasha Filipenko’s Hounding

Sasha Filipenko’s Травля, which I think I’ll call Hounding in English, is one of the shortest Big Book finalists for 2016, but this fast-moving, densely packed novel makes a fairly big impression. Filipenko, who has also written for Russian TV, manages to pack a lot into around 190 pages with a story that involves, among other things, strong themes of socio-economic resentment and politically motivated hounding.

I’ll start by jumping a bit into the book, at the point where one Lev Smyslov (surname rooted in sense/meaning) goes to see his much-younger brother Mark, a cellist who’s in Switzerland for a concert that he’s scheduled to perform in several hours. Lev has told Mark he has to make the visit at that particular time because he’ll be gone the next day. (Of course this raises worries of suicide…) Lev tells first of his shame at their father’s fall from financial grace because of the 1998 default, which forced the family to move to a part of St. Petersburg that Lev doesn’t like: it’s noisy, there’s bullying in the new school, he steals nice clothes from old friends when he goes to visit, and neighbors deal drugs in their kitchen. I’ll fast-forward a few years, to when the ties Lev made in that building bring him back in contact with his neighbor Kalo, who’s from the family that dealt drugs. They work on a project for another former neighbor, Vladimir Slavin (surname rooted in glory/fame), who’s now involved in politics, very rich, and very unhappy with articles by journalist Anton Pyatyi (surname meaning “fifth,” which reminds of “the fifth column”) that have forced Slavin to recall his family from Europe (oh, the shame!). And so Slavin hires Kalo and Lev to hound Pyatyi.

Though Filipenko includes scenes of Slavin’s family members—his son Sasha, who’s a soccer player who happens to be gay, is most memorable—and Pyatyi’s family life, the bulk of the novel covers the hounding itself. I’m not sure if page count would back that up but, for this reader at any rate, most of the novel’s suspense and emotion certainly lie there, as Kalo and Lev gradually ratchet up the pressure on Pyatyi, his wife, and their baby daughter. Sleep deprivation and noise are key early on but Pyatyi doesn’t give, so things inevitably move along to illicit sex.

Lots of Hounding feels familiar, almost as if it might have come from newspaper articles (troll farms, anyone?) and I wondered if Filipenko added in italicized musical terms and explanations that liken the novel to a sonata to try to make it feel artsier. Toward the beginning, for example, there’s a mention that the “hounding” motif will appear in a certain part of the melody. Though the musical notes (oops, sorry for the pun!) added a somewhat irritating instructional quality to the novel while also almost lending the feel of tragic operatic inevitability, I have to admit I didn’t pay much attention, perhaps partly because I found Filipenko’s inclusion of song lyrics from, for example, Zemfira and Nike Borzov far more convincing. In any event, they fell by my mental wayside as I turned pages because of the plot, particularly in the first half, where Lev’s personal resentment builds as public life falls apart after the default. And then there’s poor Pyatyi, who just plain wants to get some sleep.

Above the individual characters’ problems there hangs a roiling dark cloud of accursed questions about truth, media, politics, patriotism, money, access, message, privilege, nastiness, and, yes, hounding. Questions that seem to be popping up everywhere. Though the defined setting and characters in Hounding are uniquely Russian, the themes that underlie them feel depressingly universal, common, and even perhaps Propp-like. I would be thoroughly derelict in my duties if I didn’t mention that Filipenko includes numerous very funny jabs, like Mrs. Slavina founding a foundation to help the victims of plastic surgery or Sasha Slavin mentioning an over-dependence on intonation and diminutives in contemporary Russian. Though I might have appreciated slightly more psychological development of secondary characters—that despite having been informed from the very, very beginning that I was about to read chamber music—I couldn’t put this suspenseful, chatty book down.

Up Next: Booker Prize finalists, to be announced on Wednesday. Moscow trip report. American Literary Translators Association conference trip report. Alexander Snegirev’s Vera/Faith and Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Timosha’s Prose.

Disclaimers: I received an electronic copy of the book from Big Book but read it in print form.

Big Book Four: Ulitskaya’s Yakov’s Ladder

Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Лестница Якова (Yakov’s Ladder or Jacob’s Ladder, though I’ll use Ulitskaya’s agent’s title with “Yakov”) is a family saga of sorts, a novel that solidly covers four generations, with mentions of two others. One is younger and the other is older than the core four. Ulitskaya varies her form—sometimes writing almost story-like episodes about characters, sometimes including letters from her personal family archive—as she jumps back and forth in time, too, stretching from 1907 to 2011. To Ulitskaya’s great credit, she manages to structure the book so it feels like a novel and reinforces one of the book’s recurring themes: the difficulties that separations create for the family in all generations.

The book starts off promisingly, presenting four generations at once: Nora Osetskaya is introduced as the mother of an infant son, Yurik. She soon takes a call from her father, Genrikh, who’s calling to say that his mother, Marusya, has died. When Nora goes to her grandmother’s apartment, she takes a chest of family letters. (This small chest turns out to contain more than letters: there are also bedbugs that bite Nora during that first night. This earned three exclamation marks in the margin.)

There’s far too much plot in this book of more than 700 pages to write anything that resembles a meaningful plot summary but, for this reader, it’s the separations that unify the novel most successfully, thanks to how Ulitskaya incorporates the personal (e.g. the letters) and the historical and political. I should note that the Elkost literary agency’s Web site sums up the book’s examination of freedom very concisely. ***I will now include mild spoilers. The book will be published in English by FSG.*** Marusya and Yakov meet at a Rachmaninov concert—theater, dance, and music twist into a thick, thick thread in the book—and quickly become a couple, though they are separated almost as quickly when Marusya leaves Kiev for Moscow to study dance. I found their generation the most compelling in the book, perhaps because of Yakov’s combination of optimism that his relationship with Marusya can survive multiple terms of exile and the occasionally cranky (rightfully so, really) honesty he expresses in his letters. At one point he writes, “И теперь каждому ясно, кто разрушил мою семью. И таких, как мы, я вижу вокруг себя тысячи.” (Literally: “And it’s now clear to anyone who destroyed my family. And I see thousands like us around me.”) The book contains chunks of Ulitskaya’s grandfather’s personal letters and KGB file. Yakov was, for me, the most fully formed character in the novel, with his study of music, ability to find work wherever he lands, and attempts to hold his family together.

Nora, Yakov’s granddaughter, born in 1943, also gets a fair bit of attention, though I think her chapters lack the spark of Yakov’s. Nora marries her unusual high school boyfriend, Viktor, though they never live together and she has a closer—I’m thinking soulful here, not location, since they often go for months, even years, without any contact—relationship with Tengiz, a Georgian theater colleague she collaborates with. Yurik, too, gets plenty of ink, and he’s perhaps most notable for love of his music, where the Beatles (of course!) play a big role, along with the gift of a guitar from Tengiz. Yurik ends up in New York for part of the book, where Ulitskaya’s writing about his bohemian nineties life leans toward the essayistic and encyclopedic. She includes many details of the time and place, rather than focusing on character development that might have given me more basis for understanding Yurik’s heroin addiction.

All in all, Yakov’s Ladder certainly isn’t my favorite Ulitskaya novel—I think I’ll always prefer her Daniel Stein (previous post) and Sincerely Yours, Shurik—and she hits on many of my personal “please don’t” biases by using a fractured form (less successfully, I think, than in Daniel Stein, where she really made it work, but still effectively enough), including a real-life minor character (Solomon Mikhoels, who is a thoroughly interesting figure but…), and, as I mentioned above, background that felt superfluous. Despite all that—and its 700-plus-page physical heft—Yakov’s Ladder managed to hold my interest enough for me to finish the novel: nothing in the book felt especially new to me but I suspect it’s the familiarity of Ulitskaya’s settings, characters, and conclusions about the legacy of the past that make her books feel so easy—“easy” for me here means to comfortable to read despite some uncomfortable subject matter—to read. It’s no wonder the print run listed in my copy of Yakov’s Ladder is 100,000 copies and a translation is on the way.

Up next: Moscow trip report. Alexander Snegirev’s Faith/Vera and Oleg Zaionchkovsksky’s Timosha’s Prose: I think I’m going to write about these two in one post since there were odd similarities between them… And Sasha Filipenko’s Травля (Persecution, maybe? I’m still undecided), which is (about a quarter in) painful enjoyment, painful because of the characters’ difficulties but enjoyable because it’s strangely suspenseful and pretty lively. Unless it implodes, I suspect I’ll rate it fairly high on my Big Book ballot.

Disclaimers: The usual. I received electronic copies of the book from Ulitskaya’s literary agency, Elkost, whom I’ve known for some years now, and from the Big Book Award, where I’m a member of the jury. But I read the book in a printed edition.