Riding Yakovleva’s Red Horse

I often seem to enjoy detective novels most for their portrayals of fears related to violent crime. I love the formal aspect, too, particularly when writers stretch the genre: What builds suspense and keeps the pages turning? Beyond that, I like thinking about how all those factors tend to differ in books from various countries. What might they indicate about cultures and societies?

In novels like Yulia Yakovleva’s Укрощение красного коня (Taming the Red Horse; you might want to click through for a plot summary), the fears go far beyond violent crime and, for me, anyway, the suspense comes far less from trying to figure out who dunnit than in wondering how detective Vasily Zaitsev will act when forced to face moral dilemmas. Zaitsev isn’t perfect but he does pretty well, ethically speaking, particularly given the decisions facing a resident of Leningrad in the early 1930s. I’ll confess that I don’t even remember who, exactly, ended up committing the crime. I focused primarily on Yakovleva’s geographical settings in Leningrad and Starocherkassk, not to mention the treacherous temporal setting when—this is mentioned early in the novel—most crimes were being labeled with “political.”

The basic crime here is that a lauded horse (Пряник, Gingerbread, sometimes a cookie, I love them) keels over at the race track and his rider ends up dead, too. Despite a distinct lack of interest at HQ, Zaitsev insists on investigating, leading him to a cavalry riding school, a vet school, and, eventually, Starocherkassk. The horse turns out to an Orlov and varying opinions among the novel’s horsey characters—is it better to purify the breed or bring in new blood?—seem to echo social issues of the time, particularly given the “red” in the novel’s title. Even with the horse details, in my reading, Zaitsev’s detective investigation feels like just a formal skeleton for a novel about a period when society is divided—the revolution wasn’t even a full generation ago—leading Zaitsev to wonder, for example, how a horse can differ in tsarist and Soviet times, and to notice differences in how former nobles and present peasants/workers comport themselves. Yakovleva somehow works this all into the story so it feels very natural: she’s chosen her temporal setting and formed her main characters wisely.

One of Zaitsev’s challenges is an assignment to travel to Starocherkassk with a woman named Zoya, whom he first meets when she comes to his office and throws up in his wastebasket. I figured out the cause long before Zaitsev does (he’s smart about crime but not biology!) and though he initially seems to have difficulty with Zoya’s feminist views (I noted down “Zaitsev not much for women’s lib”), he softens considerably over the course of the novel, particularly after realizing why she’s thrown up and seeing how she sacrifices so they’ll both have enough to eat during their time away. Zoya, by the way, brings Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don on the trip with her.

Dekulakization is the source of many of Zaitsev’s moral dilemmas. He gives food to starving children at a station stop during his train trip with Zoya and is later asked to participate in a security operation, as part of a “communist answer” to the “kulak bandits.” When Zaitsev is asked to participate in another unsavory bit of work later in the book, he again finds a way to refuse. The era’s catastrophic combination of repression, food shortages, dekulakization, and collectivization affect Zaitsev and Zoya in other ways, too. Zaitsev even wonders if they’re being lodged with a family that’s moved into a former kulak’s house.

If all that isn’t enough, the book oozes with atmosphere, something Yakovleva’s very good at creating. There are smelly bars, Zaitsev’s crowded communal apartment (a neighbor lends him luggage), and the unbearable heat in Starocherkassk. Sweat. Fairly early in the novel, I noted “a feeling of filth” when Zaitsev pats a stray dog then goes to rinse his hand in the Moika river, the same place people urinate. Not to worry: the water smells fresh anyway. I cringed anyway. There are nice little touches about Zaitsev, too: before leaving Starocherkassk for Leningrad, he makes sure to return tiffin boxes to a cafeteria worker so she won’t get in trouble.

I enjoyed Yakovleva’s first Zaitsev novel, Tinker, Tailor (previous post), but I think Red Horse is a much better book. Tinker, Tailor has some awkward plot lines (the love story, the imprisonment) and is saved by atmosphere, Leningrad, a serial killer’s quirky method, and Zaitsev himself. Red Horse isn’t perfect—it’s a bit long in places—but it moves along at a moderate pace, going into enough depth about Zaitsev’s psychological state and all the difficulties he faces at home (why does he suddenly have lots of servants he doesn’t need?) and work (will he be a goner because he’s acting according to his conscience?). Yakovleva layers all that very well, creating a sort of hybrid book: it’s ostensibly a detective novel but, as I mentioned above, I don’t even remember who dunnit because I was far more interested in Zaitsev, his identity, and his environment. That’s what kept me turning pages. Reviewer Kira Dolinina, writing for Kommersant, seems to have read the book similarly and I hope she’s right that Yakovleva doesn’t seem to have exhausted the detective genre yet. I, too, would love to read more about Zaitsev.

Up Next: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, two English-language titles, and the Strugatsky Brothers’ Doomed City, which will be the first of their books that I’ve been able to read in its entirety in Russian. (I’m not quite done but I already know I’ll have to finish!)

Disclaimers: The usual. I first heard about Yakovleva’s books from Banke, Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency; BGS represents Yakovleva and quite a few of my authors, and I often collaborate with them.

Snowy Day (Yet Again!) Potpourri: Two News Items & Two Books

First, two brief news items...

This year’s Prix Russophonie went to Hélène Henri-Safier for her French translation of Dmitrii Bykov’s Pasternak. Henri-Safier’s translation of Pasternak also won the 2012 Read Russia award, in the contemporary literature category. Further details about the Prix Russophonie are online here. Other finalists for the prize translated Mandelshtam, Tsvetaeva, Girshovich, and a band of OBERIU writers.

Poet, translator, and publisher Maksim Amelin won the Solzhenitsyn Prize today. Several of Amelin’s poems are included in the bilingual collection Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Evgeny Bunimovich and Jim Kates; the book is from Dalkey Archive.

Now, two brief notes on books…

Konstantin Flavitskii's not-quite-real account.

Grigorii Danilevskii’s Княжна Тараканова (Princess Tarakanova where the princess word means a prince’s unmarried daughter, oy, oy, oy!) is an 1883 historical novel about the demise of pretendress Elizaveta Tarakanova, who claimed to be the daughter of Empress Elizabeth. Danilevskii tells his version of the story in two parts: the first is the diary of naval lieutenant Pavel Kontsov, who meets Tarakanova after he escapes from an Istanbul prison; his previous adventures include serving in the Battle of Chesma in 1770. True to his time, Kontsov tells his story as a confession of sorts, mentions Kheraskov (!), and experiences perils both sentimental and maritime. Kontsov writes his diary in 1775 on a ship, The Northern Eagle, stuffing the pages into a bottle that he tosses overboard during a storm he fears will wreck the ship.

Do not fear, dear readers: the bottle and the diary are, of course, found in the second half of the book! The second section, told in a rather bland third-person narrative, also includes scenes of the captured Tarakanova in Peter and Paul Fortress and a wrapping up of various loose ends from Kontsov’s story. Catherine the Great is also present. All in all, I wouldn’t say Princess Tarakanova is great literature but it made for moderately entertaining, easy reading on tired evenings. The highlight was Danilevskii’s nineteenth-century take on the eighteenth century.

An Armenian Sketchbook is Vasily Grossman’s Добро вам, literally Good to You, in a translation from Robert and Elizabeth Chandler; I read the Chandlers’ translation. Grossman wrote An Armenian Sketchbook about his 1961 travel to Armenia, where he went to rewrite a literal Armenian-Russian translation of a novel by Hrachya Kochar. Grossman hardly writes about the work, the writer, or the translator—I’ll admit this was, initially, a disappointment for me—but I found his descriptions of and reflections on things like Armenia’s stone (“Here, we were still in the Stone Age.”), poverty, history, and trout surprisingly absorbing. In describing village life, for example, Grossman catalogues certain residents’ criminal activity and I scribbled in the margins that the passage reads like true-life чернуха, that dark naturalism I’ve mentioned so many times before.

Robert Chandler and Yuri Bit-Yunan’s very helpful introduction to An Armenian Sketchbook notes the “deeply personal” and spontaneous nature of the writing in Sketchbook and mentions that Grossman was, at the time, in the early stages of cancer, which caused him physical difficulties that are detailed in the book. Mortality is a frequent motif and in one scene, after some heavy drinking, Grossman writes, “At this point I realized that I was dying.” He describes some of these sensations—his “I,” for example, separating from his physical body, and aloneness—then, two pages later writes, “If the world were not so beautiful, the anguish of a dying man would not be so terrible, so incomparably more terrible than any other experiences.” Grossman closes Sketchbook with some lovely descriptions of a wedding that culminates, at least in Grossman’s account, in a dance with candles. Two of his last lines are, “Probably I have said much that is clumsy and wrong. But all I have said, clumsy or not, I have said with love.” I think it’s that love, along with the spontaneity that Chandler and Bit-Yunan mention in their introduction, that appealed to me so much in An Armenian Sketchbook.

Disclosures: The usual for the news items. I received a copy of An Armenian Sketchbook from the publisher, New York Review Books; I am collaborating with Robert Chandler on a story by Andrei Platonov for a collection that NYRB will publish.

Up Next: Ekaterina Sherga’s The Underground Ship, which just took an interesting turn. And maybe favorites from the letter R… we’ll see.