A Little Existentialism -- Two Short Novels by Vladimir Makanin

How many languages have a diminutive for "existential"? There is at least one: Russian, with экзистенциалка (ekzistentsialka). It's not important that the word is rare and a Google search only pops 23 results in the nominative case. It exists. And why shouldn't it? Some of us have tender feelings for stark, dark novels and movies about life, death, and the choices they force.

If you've been yearning to read a couple of very accessible existential novellas, I have two suggestions: Vladimir Makanin's Лаз (Escape Hatch) and Долог наш путь (The Long Road Ahead). Escape Hatch was nominated for the first-ever Russian Booker Prize in 1992, and it has been neatly combined with the complementary Long Road for a volume of translations. (This piece describes the book nicely, but contains a lot of spoilers for The Long Road. This review also has a few spoilers.)

Escape Hatch begins with a cat standing at a door, blocking her master by not deciding whether to stay in or go out. The paragraph sums up a lot: the cat's person, Kliucharev (the root, kliuch, means "key"), is also torn between two places. He lives on the earth's surface, where life is dark, hungry, and violent, but uses a hole to climb underground, where lighting is natural and people enjoy good food and wine.

The hole's opening shrinks during the course of the book, making passage more dangerous. Meanwhile, Makanin examines the stark dichotomies of Kliucharev's life and choices: up or down, dark or light, crowd or individual, freedom or entrapment, life and death. In one scene, Kliucharev squeezes below ground, landing in a cafe, where he is offered a nice meal, a shot, and, most important, the chance to listen to conversation about Dostoevsky and the undesirability of happiness based on the unhappiness of others. He considers himself an intellectual, so the conversation causes him to come to life, writes Makanin, like a fish returning to water.

Escape Hatch is oddly suspenseful, whether Makanin shows Kliucharev navigating a crowd, a deserted street, or the hatch. Makanin also includes some nice touches, like comparing Kliucharev to a worm as he crawls through the dirt... years before genomic sequencing showed how much human and worm genes hold in common. The book's setting, though Russian, is left vague, and it's unclear what caused a societal breakdown.

The Long Road Ahead has a much different feel. It is less schematic than Escape Hatch, and has a dystopian bent: there haven't been wars for 200 years, and society lives with the comforting idea that food is synthetic, eliminating the need for killing, say, cows. Of course not all is as it seems, and Makanin's nameless main character, a man on a business trip, becomes caught up in situations that make him feel trapped.

I normally don't take well to postmodern devices that twist plots and narration, but Makanin uses one in The Long Road in a way that, I think, works because it doesn't distract from the meaning of the story. The ending combines dread, hope, and strange beauty in a way that crystallizes Makanin's ideas.

The pleasure of reading Makanin's fiction is that he successfully demonstrates his philosophy and ideas through plot and characters, rather than lectures, making even the strangest actions and places feel quite real. Makanin's unpretentious approach provides stories that encourage, rather than coerce, the reader to explore layers of meaning.

These two short novels fit nicely with comments that Makanin made about his philosophy of life and death during a 2004 interview on the Russian talk show Ночной полёт (Night Flight). Although Makanin spoke about his newer book Испуг (Fear), about an old man's love for a much-younger woman, his talk about the fear of death and loneliness complemented Escape Hatch and The Long Road. He also reinforced the optimism that I felt when reading his work, particularly The Long Road. When people become fearful of life, Makanin suggested that they simply live their lives. Prodded by the moderator to clarify, he said that we should love but also remember that we will die. Something about Makanin was endearingly sincere.

Two other translations of Makanin are available in English:

-Утрата (The Loss), a volume containing a novella and two short stories.
-Стол, покрытый сукном и с графином в середине (Baize-Covered Table with Decanter), which won the Russian Booker in 1993. This novel is about interrogation; it creates an atmosphere that felt, to me, far more claustrophobic than the tunnel in Escape Hatch. Although I had looked forward to reading it, I just couldn't get into Table. I'll try again someday, but I think Table suffered by comparison to the imaginative novellas I read: Table felt less interesting because interrogation has, unfortunately, been all too common a theme in Russian life and literature.

Vladimir Makanin Books on Amazon

Бестселлеры -- Bestsellers, Moscow-style

Bestselling books last week at Moscow's Biblio-Globus? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, a cookbook for the lazy, plus self-help books on smoking cessation, talking to your child, career advice for women, and how rational people make stupid mistakes that can ruin their lives.

That's not all, of course. Romance and detectives were represented, too, and there were some translations from French plus, of all things, William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

There was also a little space for Russian literary fiction... whatever that means:

Vladimir Voinovich recently published his third (and final, he says) novel about Private Ivan Chonkin. The Chonkin books are Soviet classics, satires about Soviet life and bureaucracy that are easier read than described. I also enjoyed Voinovich's Монументальная пропаганда (Monumental Propaganda), which picks up a tangent from the Chonkin books. Here's what I wrote about it for a literature workshop:

Vladimir Voinovich’s Monumental Propaganda isn’t a Soviet-era work but this satire begins in the 1940s and ends in the ‘90s, covering the life of a woman who likes Stalin so much that she has a statue of him put up in her city. When the statue is taken down during the Khrushchev era, she brings it to her apartment, where she cleans and talks to it. The book lags a bit in the beginning (despite a lot of humor) but is a good portrait of someone who sticks by the Stalin mythology – I saw people like this character marching in the streets of Moscow and found the book very believable in its look at how politics affects real lives. Voinovich is extremely popular; his Chonkin books are must-reads, and some of his short stories are also very good.

Evgenii Grishkovets's Следы на мне (Traces on Me)is a collection of short stories. Here's my translation of part of the description on Biblio-Globus: "Grishkovets discusses people who played an important role in his life. Some stories, some events -- nothing exotic. Impressions and experiences that are more important than events." The focus is not on the book's "heroes" but on life and self, adds the summary.

It's oddly frustrating for a writer to read Grishkovets: I think many of us probably think we could have written his books and stories. They feel very simple, in both style and content. But that simplicity -- and, even more important, an unabashed sincerity -- have made Grishkovets uniquely popular. He examines small things in life that almost any reader can relate to: waking up and feeling like you're sick, obsession with being in love, or finding a pre-warmed seat on public transportation. Russians enjoy Grishkovets's writing, music, and stage productions enough that I've seen him in American Express ads. (Member since when, you wonder? I don't remember.) I particularly like Grishkovets's spoken songs and think his short novel, Рубашка (The Shirt), would do well in translation. It is also a nice book for students of Russian because it is short and fairly easy to read.

Post Scriptum: Perennial Bestsellers. Sergei Luk'ianenko and Dar'ia Dontsova are also on the list. Luk'ianenko wrote Ночной дозор (Night Watch) and its sequels, which have been adapted into two blockbuster Russian films that fall somewhere into the science fiction and fantasy realms. They show the struggle between people representing light and dark, though Luk'ianenko says they are better described as altruists and egoists. I read the first half of the first book and thought it was just okay. It quickly felt repetitive (or perhaps predictable), though I rather liked the casual narrative voice.

Dontsova has written several series of "ironic detective" novels with (translated) titles like Kama Sutra for Mickey Mouse and The Frog of the Baskervilles. She is fantastically popular, in large part, I suspect, because her books are optimistic and show everyday women of various social classes solving crimes, lovin' it at McDonald's, and holding extended households together. Dontsova's books are not literary (or likely to be translated), and I've found that some of them could use more editing, but they're predictable in a good way: she doesn't stray from her genre, and all the books I've read wrap up happily.

At the end of a busy and stressful day, many Russian women want something light, not a postmodern prize winner. Incidentally, optimism is a big part of Dontsova's life: I first learned about her when she was on a Russian talk show, speaking about how she survived cancer. Dontsova's best-selling book this time around is the cookbook for lazy people!

In this posting:
Vladimir Voinovich Books on Amazon
Night Watch on Amazon

Remembering Stalin's Victims

Earlier this week, Russian human rights organizations led memorial ceremonies to remember people who were imprisoned and killed during the Stalin-era repression. I remember some Russians telling me in the early ‘90s that they had gotten over the trauma of learning about the millions of deaths of the Soviet period. The necessity of reading Solzhenitsyn, one man told me, has passed. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now.

I've listed below some works of fiction that look at Soviet-era repression from varying perspectives. Rather than writing a lot about them, I’ve linked titles and author names to background information and reviews, many of which make for interesting reading themselves, as reflections of their times and their writers.

Колымские рассказы (Kolyma Tales) by Varlam Shalamov – Sparely written short stories about prison camps. Often included in anthologies.

В круге первом (The First Circle) and Один день Ивана Денисовича (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle is a long novel that looks at life in a sharashka, basically a scientific lab staffed by prisoners. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is much shorter and details the difficulties of prison camp.

Дети Арбата (Children of the Arbat), by Anatolii Rybakov, leads off a trilogy that chronicles what happens when a young man is exiled for making “mistakes.” As one Russian reader noted on an Internet forum, the book reads along easily but is difficult to take because Rybakov wrote truthfully, leaving an unpleasant feeling about what happens. The trilogy, particularly the first volume, is well worth the time and the unpleasant feelings.

Софья Петровна (Sofia Petrovna), a short and simply written novel by Lydia Chukovskaya, looks at how disappearances affect the life of one woman.

Also:

Anna Akhmatova’s poetry cycle Реквием (Requiem) is very powerful.

Nonfiction books include Solzhenitsyn’s lengthy Архипелаг ГУЛаг (Gulag Archipelago), Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Крутой маршрут (Journey Into the Whirlwind), and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam’s Hope Against Hope.

Good books about other time periods include Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Записки из мёртвого дома (House of the Dead), which includes some very descriptive and emotional scenes of prison life, and poet Irina Ratushinskaya’s memoir about imprisonment during the Brezhnev era, Серый – цвет надежды (Gray Is the Color of Hope).

Books mentioned in this posting:

Kolyma Tales (Twentieth-Century Classics)
The First Circle (European Classics)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Novel
Children of the Arbat
Sofia Petrovna (European Classics)
The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956
Journey into the Whirlwind (Helen and Kurt Wolff Books)
Hope Against Hope: A Memoir
Memoirs from the House of the Dead (Oxford World's Classics (Oxford University Press).)
Grey Is Color of Hope

The Charms of Kharms

Daniil Kharms is back, just in time for this year's Russian elections! Natal’ia Mitroshina’s Падение в небеса (Falling into the Heavens), based on Kharms’s diary and cycle of stories, Случаи (Incidences), is a featured film at this fall's 2morrow/завтра film festival in Moscow.

Kharms is tremendously popular in Russia, at least among my friends, but it took me years to appreciate his absurd stories and poems. By the time I understood, from personal experience, what my friends meant when they said that living in Russia meant always having to prove that you’re not a camel, I was ready for Kharms. Maybe it’s time to try Waiting for Godot again, too.

Kharms may be an acquired taste, at least for some of us, but he does have his charms, particularly for students of Russian. His writing is often simple and repetitive, with fairly easy vocabulary. And the element of absurdity builds a skill that’s often overlooked: confidence in your reading comprehension skills. Can blows to the head with a cucumber really kill? In this world, yes.

I like to page through my Kharms book and read random pieces. My favorite so far has been his longest story, “Старуха” (“The Old Woman”). Here’s what I wrote about it for a Soviet literature workshop last year:

“The Old Woman” is one of Daniil Kharms’s longest works but, at 20+ pages, still quite short. Kharms is known and much loved in Russia for his avant-garde, absurd, and very short stories, many of which are difficult for us to relate to. “The Old Woman” combines, among other elements, black humor, a Stalin-era feeling of desperation about life (Kharms was arrested more than once), the St. Petersburg tradition of fantastically strange events. Absurd stories don’t often appeal to me, but I found this one oddly compelling. There is a dual-language version available on Amazon.com; much of the language in the Russian original is quite simple. Kharms: The Old Woman (Bristol Russian Texts Series) (Bristol Russian Texts Series)

-For more Kharmsian absurdity, try these translated stories in a recent issue of The New Yorker.

-On a non-Kharms note, if you’re interested in the connection between camels and absurdity, you might enjoy Jerzy Stuhr’s “The Big Animal,” summarized nicely in this review. I loved this movie.

"Not By Bread Alone": A Literary Footnote to "Doctor Zhivago"

When Boris Pasternak was named the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1958, he initially intended to accept the award. But five days after telegramming his delight with the honor, Pasternak caved in to pressure from the Soviet literary community and sent another telegram to Sweden, this time refusing the award. Pasternak’s telegrams to the Nobel Committee and his inability to claim the award are well known. This brief Sovlit.com account of the controversy quotes from Pasternak’s letter to the Soviet Writers Union, mentioning Pasternak’s belief that writing and publishing Доктор Живаго (Doctor Zhivago) was not inconsistent with being a Soviet person.
Pasternak’s rationale? Official publication of Vladimir Dudintsev’s Не хлебом единым (Not By Bread Alone), a novel that examined questions of individuality and the collective. Unlike Doctor Zhivago, Dudintsev’s book has been largely forgotten, except as an example of loosened censorship and hope during Khrushchev’s thaw.

Unfortunately, Zhivago was not published in the Soviet Union until perestroika. Russian-language editions were available in the West in two forms: regular-sized books or tiny paperbacks that were easy to sneak into the USSR in a pocket. I bought the miniature version because the standard book was much more expensive.

Here's what I wrote for a Soviet fiction workshop last year about Not by Bread Alone:

Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not By Bread Alone is a somewhat peculiar book because of its historical time, the Khrushchev thaw. With a production novel structure and a hero battling to do what he feels is right to produce a better pipe-pouring machine that will help Soviet industry, the novel almost feels socialist realist. The twist is that the hero, Lopatkin, is an inventor who is reviled and called egotistical by a group of government bureaucrats and scientists. Government bureaucracy – not capitalist wreckers -- is the villain here.

The novel, written in 1956, was controversial when published in a literary journal, and my take is that it’s most important for the fact of being published, not its literary merit. The ado about the book was so strong that Dudintsev was condemned at a writers’ union meeting, whereupon he fainted. If you have read a socialist realist novel or two before this book, you’ll understand the book’s significance. As a novel, however, Not By Bread Alone is far from great. Much of what happens is predictable, and the characters are not all very developed, despite the book’s length. Some literary devices are painfully obvious and awkwardly handled: naming a character Надежда (Hope), comparing the inventor to Christ, etc. The book reads easily because the inventor and love subplots interrupt each other, but it feels too long.

Books mentioned in this post:

Doctor Zhivago Not by Bread Alone by Vladimir Dudintsev