The 2013 Russian Booker Prize Long List… All of It

Every so often, I enjoy going through an entire book award long list, methodically looking for books I might enjoy reading. I’m not quite sure what possessed me to sift through the entire 2013 (Russian!) Booker Prize long list on a slightly cloudy but warm and very beach-worthy Saturday afternoon, but there you have it.

So here’s the long list, in Russian alphabetical order by author, with comments, some of which may be a bit odd and uneven since many of the books don’t seem to have gotten much attention… or at least not the kind of attention that I.I. Google recognizes and rewards. I starred the books I’m most interested in. The short list will be announced on October 3.

1. Aleksandr Arkhangel’skii: Музей революции (Museum of the Revolution). I always hate to start a list on a negative note but I tried reading this novel and just didn’t get very far, due to lack of interest; I didn’t even read far enough to get into the museum conflict…

2. * Nikolai Baitov: Любовь Муры (Mura’s Love). The publisher’s blurb says this epistolary novel is about two women’s forbidden love in the 1930s and 1940s, though two reviews I looked at dispute the “forbidden” part. There are, however, two women. And there is love.

3. * Nadezhda Belen’kaia. Рыбы молчат по-испански (Fish Keep Quiet in Spanish). A novel about international adoptions of Russian children.

4. Vladimir Vester: Отель разбитых сердец (Heartbreak Hotel). The book’s subtitle, Секс, кино, один ствол и вечно живой Элвис Пресли—Sex, the Movies, One Gun, and an/the Eternally Alive Elvis Presley—seems to say it all.

5. Evgenii (Eugene) Vodolazkin: Лавр (Laurus). One of my favorites (previous post). Already a finalist for this year’s NatsBest and Big Book.

6. Andrei Volos: Возвращение в Панджруд (excerpts) (Return to Panjrud). Volos, who is originally from Dushanbe, often writes about Central Asia. His agent’s site says this novel is about a poet in the Middle Ages. Finalist for this year’s Big Book.

7. * Valerii Votrin: Логопед (The Speech Therapist). The Speech Therapist’s publisher describes the book as depicting a “linguistic antiutopia.” There are two main characters: a speech therapist and a journalist. Watch your spelling and punctuation, people!

8. * Alisa Ganieva: Праздничная гора (excerpt) (Holiday Mountain). A novel about Dagestan… in which Dagestan becomes separate from Russia, resulting in problems and not-so-happy endings.

9. Vladimir Gubailovskii: Учитель цинизма (The Teacher of Cynicism or Cynicism’s Teacher?). A 2012 Big Book finalist. The main character is math student at Moscow State University in the late Soviet era.

10. Denis Gutsko: Бета-самец (Beta Male). This sounds like a novel about a middle-aged guy (not an alpha!) with good connections but not a lot of ambition who is presented with a situation that changes his life.

Menshikov in Berezovo (1888)

11. Andrei Demkin: Ненаписанный дневник (excerpt) (The Unwritten Diary). A historical novel about prince Aleksandr Menshikov and his exile, and the work of artist Vasilii Surikov, who really did paint Menshikov. Hmm.

12. Oleg Ermakov: С той стороны дерева (From the Other Side of the Tree). Apparently about a man who goes to Lake Baikal and finds everything he was looking for and more, including love and local myths.

13. Andrei Ivanov: Харбинские мотыльки (The Moths of Harbin). A novel about Russians in Estonia during 1920-1940. This sounds like a difficult but interesting novel.

14. Aleksandr (Alexander) Kabakov: Старик и ангел (The Old Man and the Angel). A professor in his seventies has regrets about his life, then a heart attack changes all. A review on Timeout.ru compares Kabakov’s writing to Aksyonov’s.

15. Anatolii Kurchatkin: Чудо хождения по водам (The Miracle of Walking on Water). According to the Tver’ libraries’ description: a man suddenly discovers he can walk on water, though only when other people are around.

16. Maya Kucherskaya: Тетя Мотя (Auntie Motya a.k.a. Auntie Mina). Another one I couldn’t quite get into: this book about a couple’s not-so-successful life together felt too contrived to me. As of this writing, it’s the top gatherer of Facebook “likes” among 2013 Big Book finalists, though.

17. * Vadim Levental’: Маша Регина (Masha Regina). Levental’s debut novel is about a woman from the provinces who becomes a world-famous film director. Another 2013 Big Book finalist.

18. Olesya Nikolaeva. Меценат. Жизнеописание Александра Берга. (The Patron/Sponsor/Philanthropist. The Life of Aleksandr Berg). A detective novel about the murder of a monastery official.

19. Aleksei Slapovskii. Вспять. Хроника перевернувшегося времени (Backward. A Chronicle of Time Upended (or something of the sort!)). Time goes backward in a provincial town, giving people another last Friday instead of a new Sunday. Sounds like déjà vu all over again.

20. Sergei Solov’ev: Адамов мост (Adam’s Bridge). This one seems to defy summarization India. Jungles. He and She.

21. Andrei Tavrov: Матрос на мачте (The Sailor on the Mast). In this novel, Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov meets a young woman who’s traveling around the Caucasus.

22. Margarita Khemlin: Дознаватель (The Investigator). Another one I read and enjoyed (previous post).

23. Vladimir Shapko: У подножия необъятного мира (At the Foot/Pedestal of an/the Immense World…). This work is called a poem but isn’t written as verse, though one observer who read the first installment in a journal says “poem” fits in the Greek sense because the book is an epic set in the Soviet era and looks at a huge number of characters who are regular people. Our observer sounded rather eager for a sense of what it might all mean…

24. *? Aleksandr Ebanoidze: Предчувствие октября (A Premonition of October). A novel about the Moscow intelligentsia during the transition years.

Disclosures: The usual, including my work translating various texts by Vodolazkin and Khemlin.

Up Next: Aleksandr Ilichevskii’s The Orphics, which still creeps me out; Iurii Buida’s Thief, Spy, and Murderer, which petered out; plus last month’s coven…

Image: Painting by Vasilii Surikov, via Wikipedia.

London Trip Report: Russian Poetry Week & A Bit More

Ah, travel! Ah, returns home! Ah, trip reports! My recent trip to Oxford, for the first-ever Translators’ Coven, and London, for Pushkin House Russian Poetry Week events and assorted meetings, was worthy of a slew of adjectives like fantastic, marvelous, wonderful, and, yes, productive… but trips are always difficult to describe, particularly because I’m not a very consistent note-taker, particularly when the topic is translation. I get so caught up in the programs that I forget to write. Nonetheless, here’s a very unmethodical, very noncompletionist summary of sorts, of What Went On In London. I do have more detail in my notes about certain things—including more poem titles—so add a comment if you have questions. I’ll write about Oxford soon.

Tarkovsky's grave, in Peredelkino.

Pushkin House Russian Poetry Week, organized and led by Robert Chandler, with lots of participation from Irina Mashinski and Boris Dralyuk, began on June 16 with Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize Evening, which featured winners of, appropriately, the Brodsky-Spender Translation Prize. The night was particularly fun because Sasha Dugdale, a writer, translator, and editor, interviewed two teams of translators—Boris and Irina (on Arseny Tarkovsky’s “Полевой госпиталь”/“Field Hospital”) and Glyn Maxwell and Alexandra Berlina (on Joseph Brodsky, memorably including “Ты не скажешь комару”/“You Can’t Tell a Gnat”)—about their work. My notes for this session are awful, though I did scribble down that Irina finds it particularly difficult to translate favorite poems; Maxwell said some words in Brodsky translations are “haunted by each other” rather than rhymed, as in the originals; and Sasha compared Brodsky with Toblerone chocolate. This is high praise, indeed!

Sweets came into the program again on the second night—with the spotlight on Osip Mandelshtam—when writer, teacher, and translator Victor Sonkin discussed Mandelshtam’s life and noted that Mandelshtam enjoyed tea with candies. My favorite portions of the discussion concerned one poem, “Вооруженный зреньем узких ос”: Robert read several translations of the poem, and I especially enjoyed Peter France’s version, which began with “Armed with the eyesight of thin-waisted wasps.” It was the “thin-waisted” that caught me—over “skinny” (Andrew Davis) and “slender” (John Riley)—somehow “thin-waisted” sounds and even looks better to me, both in my imagination and on the page, where a hyphen makes “thin-waisted” almost physically resemble a wasp. You can get a feel for Peter’s love for poetry and translation in these translator’s notes (and Mandelshtam translations!) in Cardinal Points.

Lucky for me, Phoebe Taplin wrote a piece about the third event—“The Soviet Union’s Other Poets”—for Russia Beyond the Headlines, mentioning specific poems. There were, once again, lots of highlights, including more mentions of a poetry anthology that Robert, Boris, and Irina are co-editing for Penguin… the book will include around 50 poets and cover the years from Pushkin to Brodsky, guided by birth years, though there seems to be some creative interpretation of dates. The book will be out within the next couple years and will include, by design, lots of poets who are relatively unknown in the West, such as Boris Slutsky, David Samoilov, Vladimir Kornilov, and Maria Petrovykh. They, along with Tarkovsky, were all part of the Wednesday program. Translators/speakers included Robert, Boris, and Irina, as well as Katherine Young and Stephen Capus.

By the time the final night rolled around—this after four muggy London days and three muggy London nights of talk about poetry, prose, and publishing—my note-taking ability sank from a polite “minimal” to nearly zero. I guess it’s appropriate that, for a program about Afanasii Fet and Fyodor Tiutchev, one of the titles I wrote down was “Silentium!” I also noted that Tiutchev was careless in his work, rarely checking proofs and allowing Ivan Turgenev to make changes. Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t remember anything else: I remember, for example, that Robert also discussed Tiutchev’s famous “Умом Россию не понять” and read a translation from fellow coven attendee Anatoly Liberman; I particularly like Anatoly’s final line, viewable here, if you scroll down.

Those muggy London days also included… a visit to the Calvert 22 Foundation, where there was no exhibit but I met with Jamie Rann, who works as comment editor at the online Calvert Journal, which contains a nice variety of articles and beautiful photos… meeting with Sarah Wallis and Paul Mitchell, who wrote and directed Russia’s Open Book, a one-hour documentary about contemporary Russian literature. The trailer is online here. I’ll be writing more about Russia’s Open Book later this year. I found, thanks to I.I. Google, that an animated chunk of the film, by Andy Acourt, won an International Motion Arts Award… Russian book shopping at Waterstone’s Russian bookshop (orderly, great selection, even if it’s pricey) and Русский мир (chaos, not much of interest that I haven’t already read) accumulated a nice stack of books that includes Aleksandr Ilichevskii’s Орфики (I’ll call it The Orphics for now), which I already read and can’t quite let go of, Iurii Buida’s Вор, шпион и убийца (Thief, Spy, and Murderer), which I’m reading and enjoying now; Maxim Kantor’s rather large Красный свет, (Red Light); and a collection of stories and a play by Nina Berberova.

I should also add that the trip generated a number of contributions to the list of Notable New Translations for 2013. There are lots of great new entries but I was especially happy to hear about Sasha Dugdale’s collection of Moscow stories for Oxford University Press, where authors range from Nikolai Karamzin to Igor Sutyagin.

Disclosures: The usual.

Up Next: Coven trip report. And Ilichevskii’s Orphics, which really and truly creeped me out with its perspectives on Moscow in 1991 and, really (of course), what came before and what came after. Then Buida’s Thief, Spy, Murderer.

Image credit: A. Savin, Creative Commons, through Wikipedia.

Favorite Russian Writers A to Я: S Is Splendid

The Russian letter С—S in the Roman alphabet—is a bit of a traffic jam for good writers. Though I don’t seem to have any S-starting favorites that I’d defend to the last letter, there are lots and lots of writers I’ve read in moderation and enjoyed enough that I look forward to reading more of their work. I’ll list some of them here. NB: I’ll address the letters Ш and Щ, which transliterate as sh and shch, later in their own posts.

Saltykov-Shchedrin

Classics first, where Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Господа Головлёвы (The Golovlyov Family or The Golovlyovs) is one of the most supremely painful and masterfully claustrophobic books about family I’ve ever read. It was almost physically difficult to read. Highly recommended! Then there’s Fedor Sologub, whose Мелкий бес (The Petty Demon) I’ve enjoyed twice, first in translation, later in Russian. It’s a wonderfully fun and diabolical symbolist novel (previous post) with characters who enjoy, among other things, tearing at wallpaper. I also remember enjoying some of Sologub’s poetry in grad school.

As for contemporary writers, there are so many S scribes I’m not sure where to start. Roman Senchin comes first, I think: everything I wrote above about The Golovlyovs applies to Senchin’s The Yeltyshevs (previous post), a novel about a family that moves to a village from a regional center. Senchin’s The Information, about a young superfluous man in Moscow, is also painful and claustrophobic, good in a different way even if it takes some time to engage with. Then there’s Marina Stepnova, whose Lazar’s Women (previous post), a family saga with twists of пошлость (poshlost’) and postmodernism, was a finalist for last year’s major awards, winning two third prizes from Big Book. I’ve also enjoyed some of Stepnova’s short stories and am looking forward to her Surgeon.

Though it feels strange, I have to acknowledge Vladimir Sorokin, whom I’ve come to appreciate, though we got off to a bad start with Ice not long after I start writing the blog (previous post). I pretty much swore then that I wouldn’t read more of the Ice trilogy… but I broke down and read the next book, Bro, (previous post) and am now even curious about the third. As I wrote at the end of my post on Bro, “It’s taken me a few years and a few books to edge into Sorokin’s world.” My favorite Sorokin book is A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik (previous post), a short novel that describes a future Russia that feels rather like the Middle Ages.

I’ve enjoyed lots more books by S-starting writers, from Olga Slavnikova’s 2017 (previous post) to Aleksandr Snegirev’s Vanity (previous post) and Petroleum Venus (previous post)… and I have lots more books by writers with names beginning in S on my shelves, notably from the Brothers Strugatsky, whose world I have yet to find a way to edge into. As always, I’m open to reading ideas.

Compass Translation Award Announcement: For all you poetry translators out there, the Compass Translation Award has extended its 2013 deadline for entries to July 15. This year’s poet for translation is Maria Petrovykh. Information about the award is here. If you’re as unfamiliar with Petrovykh as I, Wikipedia can help, thanks to Languagehat, who wrote the Petrovykh entry after enjoying reading her work.

Disclaimers: The usual, for writers and agents. I’ve translated a Senchin story and excerpts from The Yeltyshevs.

Up Next: A trip report about the Translators’ Coven in Oxford and poetry translation events in London. And I’m finally reading Maya Kucherskaya’s Тётя Мотя, which literary agency Elkost is calling Auntie Mina. I loaded Auntie on the Nook for my trip but already started reading: I’m finding it perfect for my scattered frame of mind because it’s an old-fashioned long novel focusing on characters and their situations in life. That feels soothing right now, with so much going on.

Yasnaya Polyana Long List & Rushed Reading Roundup

The Yasnaya Polyana award announced long lists for its XXI Century and Childhood, Adolescence, Youth prizes last week. The XXI Century list contains some familiar names from recent short lists: Elizaveta Aleksandrova-Zorina’s Маленький человек (A Little Man), Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Лавр (Laurus), Andrei Volos’s Возвращение в Панчруд (excerpts) (Return to Panjrud), Maksim Kantor’s Красный свет (Red Light), Evgenii Kliuev’s Translit (which won a second in the Russian Prize), Maia Kucherskaia’s Тетя Мотя (Aunt Motya), Anna Matveeva’s Подожди, я умру — и приду (Wait a Bit, I’ll Die and Then Come Back… or thereabouts), and Sergei Soloukh’s Игра в ящик (The Box Game). The only longlisted books I’ve read thus far are Vodolazkin’s Laurus (previous post) and Roman Senchin’s Информация (The Information) (previous post). Yasnaya Polyana’s long list contains 41 books, many written by writers I’ve never heard of, let alone read… which is what I appreciate about long lists. A news item from April 30, 2013, notes that Yasnaya Polyana received 163 nominations: 105 were for the XXI Century category and 58 were for Childhood, Adolescence, Youth. Of those titles, 41 made the XXI Century long list and 22 made the Childhood, Adolescence, Youth long list.

Nonfiction isn’t my thing but I can’t help but mention that the Просветитель (Educator/Enlightener) award recently announced a long list, too. Two titles caught my eye: Sergei Beliakov’s Гумилев сын Гумилева (excerpts) (Gumilev, Son of Gumilev) in the biography category, and Maxim Krongaus’s Самоучитель Олбанского (I’ll go with Teach Yourself Olbansky). Beliakov’s book is already a finalist for the 2013 Big Book award.

Reading Roundup: My attention span has been painfully short during this long season of translation deadlines, travel preparations, and achingly beautiful weather… which means I’ve been reading more short fiction than usual and tossing more books aside than usual. (This also makes me fear various types of mistakes...) I find it horribly difficult to write about short fiction without retelling or spoiling entire stories but do want to note a few I’ve enjoyed. First off, a comment from Elena Bochorichvili prompted me to seek out “Волшебная мазь” (“The Magic Ointment”), a lovely story about a Georgian family that was first published in Novyi mir. Bochorichvili uses repetition beautifully as she blends together World War 2, the legacy of Stalin, family dynamics, and a mulberry tree. I didn’t want “The Magic Ointment” to end. (Ah, the heartbreak of good short stories!) Earlier this year, a friend brought me three books of by Aleksandr Furman that are part of a four-book series called “История одного присутствия” (“The Story of One Presence”). The books tell, chronologically and from a close third-person perspective, of the Soviet-era childhood of one Aleksandr Furman. I’ve read sections from the beginning of each book and share my friend’s puzzlement about how to describe the appeal of their chapters/stories. Furman doesn’t seem to write soft-focus tales of happy childhoods: my scattered reading may be very skewed but parental comfort seems largely absent in a world filled with threats. The first piece in the second volume details a long, scary-sounding hospital stay and the second tells of a sexual predator; the first piece in volume three describes the teenaged Furman’s stay in a psychiatric hospital, where he seems to feel more comfortable than he’d felt “outside.” Something about Furman’s tone, though, is accessible, even welcoming. I’ve been enjoying reading the books out of order; this seems to be something of a habit for me. Finally, I’m officially giving up on Leonid Iuzefovich’s Князь ветра (Prince of the Wind), the inaugural National Bestseller winner, after reading 249 of 347 pages: though I enjoyed Iuzefovich’s first two historical detective novels (previous post) about Ivan Putilin, a based-on-a-real person police inspector, I found Prince of the Wind too densely stuffed with historical detail and background on Mongolia to read well. The underlying story here is good, involving murder, family dynamics (again!), the possible sale of a soul to the devil, and, yes, observations about Mongolia, but the book felt terribly out of balance to me. Alas.

Up Next: A continuation of the Favorite Russian Writers series, in which I move on to the letter S. Then a trip report on the Translators’ Coven and poetry translation events in London. And, eventually, Red Spectres: Russian Gothic Tales from the Twentieth Century, a collection of stories translated and selected by Muireann Maguire. I haven’t read all the stories yet but can already say I particularly enjoyed Aleksandr Chayanov’s “Venediktov,” where I marked the line “Thoughts of diabolical encounters persecuted me relentlessly.” The combination of chits for souls and an atmosphere reminiscent of Russian sentimentalism is a winner for me.

Disclaimers: I’ve translated fiction by Elizaveta Aleksandrova-Zorina, Evgenii Vodolazkin, Roman Senchin, and Vladislav Otroshenko, who’s a member of the Yasnaya Polyana jury. I received books by Aleksandr Furman from a friend who, if I remember correctly, obtained them from the author for me. The Overlook Press sent me a copy of Red Spectres; translator and story selector Muireann Maguire acknowledged me in the book for reading a draft of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s “The Phantom,” a story that thoroughly creeped me out even when my main focus was language… Thank you to all! 

NatsBest Thrown to the Wolves… and Bears

RIA Novosti reports that the writer known as Фигль-Мигль (Figl’-Migl’/Figgle-Miggle) won the National Bestseller award earlier today for her novel Волки и медведи (Wolves and Bears). According to RIA Novosti, the jurors split their votes between Wolves and Bears and Maxim Kantor’s Красный свет (Red Light), leaving honorary jury chair Lev Makarov to split the tie. Update: A June 3 article from Gazeta.ru offers more detail on voting: Kantor and Figgle-Miggle each had two votes, spurring the tie-breaker. Aif.ru has more, here. 

Figgle-Miggle reportedly accepted the award wearing large sunglasses, thanking the jury but declining to identify herself with a more conventional name. (Articles from June 3 include photos of the author without her glasses...) Her pseudonym is the singular of фигли-мигли, which sounds like figgly-miggly and which the Oxford Russian-English dictionary translates as “tricks.” When Figgle-Miggle’s Ты так любишь эти фильмы (You Love Those Films So Much) was shortlisted for the NatsBest in 2011, one of this blog’s readers suggested the English word “flimflam” as a possible translation. You Love… lost a tiebreaker vote to Dmitrii Bykov’s Остромов, или Ученик чародея (Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice). Update: Wolves and Bears was submitted to NatsBest as a manuscript but should, apparently, soon be out in book form.

Up Next: A mishmash of short stories? Leonid Iuzefovich’s Prince of the Wind? Or maybe letter S favorite writers?