Rasskazy: Five Favorites

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but here’s the best aspect of Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia: I love that I didn’t like all the stories. In fact, when I marked the table of contents, I only wrote “loved” next to 5/22 titles. Sure, many more rated “liked,” but others got “indifferent” or “shrug.” Why is this such a good thing? Because it means editors Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker compiled a risky, unpredictable anthology of stories that challenge readers’ preferences for style and topics.

It also means that the collection forms a wonderful pastiche of Russian voices, all age 40 or under, expressing worries, hopes, and concerns. A reader doesn’t need to love or feel a personal connection to each story to grasp converging and diverging views of similar subjects, like the war in Chechnya or coming of age in a reforming country. Finding common threads in these diverse stories is part of the book’s appeal.

I’m sure some stories that didn’t thrill me the first time will grab me when I pull them off the shelf later: short stories, I think, are in-the-moment reading that either hit or miss our moods, biases, and expectations. They’re also great material for discussion with friends: Tin House, Rasskazy’s publisher, mistakenly sent me a second copy of the book, which I sent to my friend M., who recently completed her MA in Russian literature.

M. and I both love Joseph Brodsky’s poems but so far the Venn diagram of our Rasskazy tastes barely overlaps. To wit: M. particularly liked Nikolai Epikhin’s “Рычева” (“Richeva”), translated by Mariya Gusev, for the characters’ discussion of “People who love money and a life of luxury and who are ready to deceive anyone for this personal happiness, to insult, to kill, and so on…” One character calls that approach to life “weightlifting.” That was fine, and I liked many other spots in the story, like a character telling a cat “I am not a maximalist.” Still, “Richeva” didn’t quite catch me. At least not this time.

Here are the five stories I enjoyed most this time around:

I began Rasskazy by reading Zakhar Prilepin’s “Убийца и его маленький друг” (“The Killer and His Little Friend”), translated by Svetlana Ilinskaya and Douglas Robinson. The story is about two special forces military policemen known as Primate and Gnome, and inevitable tragedy. The balance between brutality and sweetness is as delicate here as it was in Prilepin’s collection Грех (Sin), and the ending felt very, very Russian to me with its views of forgiveness and friendship.

Vladimir Kozlov’s “Праздник строя и песни” (“Drill and Song Day”), translated by Andrea Gregovich and Mikhail Iossel, also features tragedy, though it focuses on schoolchildren preparing (or not!) for an annual celebration of the army. It felt particularly true-to-life to me because I spent a couple perestroika-era months in northern Russian schools. I have tremendous respect for the concision and precision Prilepin and Kozlov achieve in their stories. Also: Gregovich noted in a comment (here) that she’s translating a collection of Kozlov’s stories.

I mentioned Anna Starobinets’s “Правила” (“Rules”), translated by Ellen Litman, a couple weeks ago: it’s a slightly haunting story about a child with, well, scary compulsions. Starobinets is sometimes called a Russian Stephen King. I hope she writes another novel.

Oleg Zobern’s “Шестая дорожка Бреговича” (“Bregovich’s Sixth Journey” scroll down), translated by Keith Gessen, concerns a chained-up dog nicknamed Ivan Denisovich, a pot of pel’meni, and freedom. (My friend M., by the way, didn’t like this story.) This story concerns literature, too. Here is our narrator discussing twentieth-century Russian literature: “The further back you go in the century, the simpler it is, everything’s in its place, whereas here—here you’re drinking a beer with some poet who became known at the end of the twentieth century, and it’s hard to tell: Is this a genuinely canonical writer, or is it a pathetic asshole who last week took a swing at his young wife and broke her nose? But with the dead—it’s all good.”

I read the last story in the book last: Natalya Klyuchareva’s “Один год в Раю” (“One Year in Paradise”), translated by Mariya Gusev, which involves Russia’s World War 2 heritage, a move to the country, interactions between generations, and a decrepit old map.

I read Rasskazy in a mix of Russian and English. I generally compare translations word-for-word only when I wonder about translators’ choices so I can’t speak about accuracy... but I will say that the Rasskazy translations seem to match the originals’ styles and feels fairly closely. I even found it easy to get lost in some translations. This is so rare and welcome that I feel a little petty mentioning that occasional words in translation – homie, wassup, “the runner only made it to second base,” &tc. – feel over-Anglicized. This is where I checked originals. To be fair, some of the Russian terms presented odd challenges, such as conversion from Olbansky, a slangy variation of Russian that uses phonetic spellings.

Even if Olbansky’s nuances (!) don’t quite translate, Rasskazy conveys so much, in English, that I recommend it highly to anyone interested in Russian contemporary culture and/or fiction. I’d love to hear other readers’ comments on specific stories.

Disclosure: Tin House, publisher of Rasskazy, provided me with not one but two copies of the book. I will continue to solicit opinions from M., recipient of the second book, to add to this post.

Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia on Amazon

Folk Tales and Fear: Starobinets’s 3/9

Once upon a time last weekend, I picked up Anna Starobinets’s Убежище 3/9 (Sanctuary 3/9) because I needed a long, long rest from Aleksandr Terekhov’s tedious, heavy, portentous combination of fact and fiction known as Каменный мост (The Stone Bridge)…

In Starobinets’s novel I found scary fun, a nightmarish, multigenre conglomeration of human fears. The book is packed with fairy tale themes, bits of apocalyptic thinking, and contemporary realities. I think the book’s characters, many of whom are archetypal and/or nameless, come to life thanks to two factors: Starobinets’s understanding of the psychology of fear and her matter-of-fact language.

To make a long story short: An accident in a Cave of Horrors carnival ride puts a small boy in a coma. His mother, Masha (Maria), is a photographer; his father, Joseph, is a cardshark. They split up. The boy ends up in an institution for disabled children. The parents end up in separate European countries, where hexes change them into scary forms. Like a spider. Meanwhile, doubles of some characters inhabit a parallel and rather sinister fairy tale-like world. And there’s more: A Web site recommends moving to Altai to avoid the dual disasters of a polar shift and a second sun hitting earth – these aren’t so different from the predictions of 2012 disasters that NASA tells us are a hoax. (Aside: What scares me most about these predictions is that NASA receives so many 2012 questions that it felt it had to make its “Ask an Astrobiologist” pages and video.)

3/9’s chapters contain a myriad of other themes and things related to folk stories and fears: wolves, strange dreams, forests with no escape, impossible choices, vampires, hexes and hypnotism, incest, abandonment of disabled children, edible houses, needles, scary carnival rides, someone whose name sounds like Lucifer, and dual realities. There’s even one of my worst fears: a zombified president. Starobinets draws in story book characters, too, particularly Hansel, Gretel, Ivan the Fool (this one undergoes trepanation, ouch), Sleeping Beauty, Masha who loses things, and Baba Yaga. Needless to say, Propp’s fairy tale functions are seen in full force.

I rarely have patience for such crowded, jumpy novels but Starobinets is a good enough storyteller that her frequent shifts between characters and subplots build suspense because she creates eerie ripples that move back and forth between her real and unreal worlds. My biggest problem was putting the book down at night. And slowing my reading enough to remember who’s who. 3/9 isn’t a mindless suspense novel, though: I didn’t finish and wish a time warp could return lost reading hours.

Instead I went back to the beginning and paged through the book, looking again at my margin notes and the strange borders between Starobinets’s invented worlds and her borrowings from storybooks. Rarely have I so enjoyed contemplating primal fears and the ways we convey them, over and over in books and stories, to find a strange kind of refuge.

Bonus One! The Rasskazy anthology edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker includes a short story by Starobinets, “Rules,” about a boy with some quietly creepy superstitions and compulsions. According to Rasskazy, “Rules” also appears in An Awkward Age, Hesperus Press’s book of Hugh Aplin’s translations of Starobinets’s stories. U.S. release date is December 1, 2009.

Bonus Two! Today’s New York Times Book Review included Liesl Schillinger’s very positive review of There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, Keith Gessen and Anna Summers’s translations of stories by Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. (review here) Though I respect her, Petrushevskaya has never been one of my favorite writers, so I enjoyed reading critic Lev Danilkin’s rather humorous comparison of Petrushevskaya and Starobinets in Danilkin’s review of 3/9. After writing that he sees Petrushevskaya in Starobinets’s female character with the Lucifer-like name, he adds that Starobinets is the Petrushevskaya of a new generation, a Euro-Petrushevskaya.

Danilkin concludes his comparison with this: “Петрушевскую читать жутко и муторно, Старобинец – жутко и весело.” (Roughly: “It’s terrifying and dark/heavy/unpleasant to read Petrushevskaya but terrifying and fun to read Starobinets.”) In case you’re curious, Danilkin goes on to say he thinks 3/9 isn’t an ideal debut novel because, summed up, it’s overcrowded. He’s right but I can forgive a lot in a book this interesting.

Starobinets's An Awkward Age
Rasskazy on Amazon
Petrushevskaya's Scary Fairy Tales

News Roundup: Survey Says, Awards, and Gulag

1. Survey Says: Master and Margarita! Please don’t ask me about survey methodology… but OpenSpace.ru reported earlier this week that the research center of the SuperJobs.ru portal polled 3,000 Russians and found that their favorite book was Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Sixteen percent voted for M&M. Respondents were allowed to name several books.

Runner up was Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace (see sidebar for previous posts on W&P) with 7 percent, followed by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, at 3 percent. Others on the list, with 1 percent: Dostoevsky’s Idiot and Brothers Karamazov, Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Ilf and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs, Aleksandr Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, Aleksandr Griboedov’s To Woe from Wit, and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls.

Foreign books were also eligible. The one-percenters: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo and Three Musketeers, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades.

2. Yasnaya Polyana Award Finalists. The three finalists for the Yasnaya Polyana literary prize are: Vasilii Golovanov for Остров (The Island), Igor’ Malyshev for Dom (The House), and Roman Senchin for Елтышевы (The Yeltyshevs) (book in Russian: beginning end). OpenSpace.ru writes that one of the prize’s jury members, Lev Anninskii, says the finalists were chosen because their books give Russian readers hope that the country will come out of its moral crisis.

The only writer of the three that I’ve read is Senchin: His Нубук (Nubuck) is about, yes, selling shoes in the 1990s. His Минус (Minus) has been translated into English, by Arch Tait. The publisher, Glas, has information and a link to an excerpt here.

The Rasskazy anthology I keep writing about contains a Senchin story, too, “Тоже история” (“History”), translated by Victoria Mesopir. The story has a documentary feel, first introducing a 62-year-old historian studying 1930s Germany, then placing him in the middle of contemporary Russian history, when he happens upon an opposition demonstration. Though the historical parallels felt a little too obvious for me and I’m not a big fan of meeting contemporary public figures in fiction, something about Senchin’s portrayal of the historian, a well-read man who is ignorant of his own country’s present, felt familiar and true.

3. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag in Schools. The New York Times, among others, reported that excerpts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Архипелаг ГУЛАГ (The Gulag Archipelago) have become part of the Russian school program. (Times story, from the Associated Press, here.) OpenSpace notes (here) that the program for schoolchildren already included Solzhenitsyn’s “Матренин двор” (“Matryona’s Home”) and Один день Ивана Денисовича (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) (previous post on Ivan Denisovich).

Photo: “A sculpture of the cat Behemoth from the novel The Master and Margarita, on a wall in Andriyivskyy Descent, Kyiv,” 2005, from Wikipedia Commons, user Boulgakov.

Notable New Translations: The Rasskazy Anthology, Post 1 -- Background

Some people look for summer thrills in surfing or skydiving. Not me. I get excited when I read new writers and have a chance to recommend a good Russian book on my blog. So here you go: Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, an English-language anthology of very contemporary Russian stories.

After reading about a third of the stories in Rasskazy, paging through the rest, and reading author bios, two thing have struck me: the unusual readability of the translations and the variety of the writers’ topics and styles. I’m pretty tough to please when it comes to translation, but the stories I’ve read only in English read naturally, normally. Meaning I could read in peace without wondering what I was missing. When I’ve read stories first in Russian then in translation (or vice versa), the translations reflected the vocabulary and tone of the originals.

Mikhail Iossel, one of the book’s editors, told me producing Rasskazy was a labor-intensive process involving unique challenges because translators worked with texts written by a new generation of writers, whose language also feels new. (Rasskazy situations include blogging, drugs, sex, and military conflict, topics that beg for specialized, slangy, or very individual vocabulary.) Generation was the primary guiding principle for selecting authors: the oldest Rasskazy writer is Dmitry Danilov, now 40. Says Iossel, “We wanted for all of them to have grown up after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.”

Space was the other major limiting factor for Iossel, his co-editor Jeff Parker, and publisher Tin House. Rasskazy contains 22 stories chosen from about 50 writers’ work. Iossel says compiling the book built on experience he and Parker gained editing Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, an anthology of essays that Dalkey Archive Press published in 2004. Rasskazy also draws on holding Summer Literary Seminar writing conferences in St. Petersburg for the last decade. Iossel says one program goal is to put St. Petersburg “into the literary mind of America.” (The St. Petersburg SLS is on hiatus for a summer or two.)

Iossel describes the current profusion of new literary talent in Russia as an “explosion,” with the new generation coming into its own several years ago, after something of a lull in fiction. Though he says “you can pretty much write anything at all,” Iossel notes that literature is not censored because audiences are so small. There is censorship on Russian TV and radio, however, and Iossel compares the current political atmosphere to the Soviet era and says society is “engulfed in this post-imperial syndrome.” He believes Russian literature and writers have “a very apt sense for the condition of nonfreedom and they feel comfortable.”

Though translations account for only about three percent of books published in the United States, Iossel says some publishing houses – he specifically mentioned Dalkey and Gray Wolf – are working to raise that figure. He thinks those efforts reflect Americans’ weariness of isolationism and their wishes to look into other lives and aesthetic experiences. “Literature does bring people together like no other art form,” says Iossel. He adds that Rasskazy is a good way for people to learn about what’s happening in Russia, both politically and aesthetically: “Everyone interested in Russia should probably take a look at it.”

I think Rasskazy’s varying voices on Russian life are a big part of the book’s fun and appeal. I pick, randomly, at anthologies rather than reading them cover to cover and have been welcoming the element of the unexpected in Rasskazy. Today: a dog named Ivan Denisovich who likes pel’meni in Oleg Zobern’s “Bregovich’s Sixth Journey,” translated by Keith Gessen. Who knows what I’ll find tomorrow?

I’ll write more about specific stories in September.

Note: This post is the first in my “Notable New Translations” category. My plan is to write more about new translations because they, their publishers, and their translators never seem to get enough attention. I encourage publishers, writers, and translators to tell me about upcoming translations so I can work them into my reading, if possible, and the blog, at the appropriate time.

Rasskazy on Amazon

Amerika on Amazon

A Novel and a Story from German Sadulaev

Sadulaev, Take One: German Sadulaev’s new novel A.D. gets off to a promising start, lamenting winter holiday overload and letdowns. (Sign me up!) Sadulaev quickly segues into a description of an office holiday party at a casino: the advertising director playing Dionysus, people drinking too much and sneaking into dark corners. A scream breaks up the party when the boss is discovered, dead in the men’s room, victim of a fork to the heart.

With the initial decadence and death, plus the fact that the Russian word ад (ad) means “Hell,” A.D. sets itself up from the start as a carnivalesque thriller-detective sort of novel with a few twists.

Russian critic Lev Danilkin writes on Afisha.ru that A.D. ends up in smoking ruins, and he gives the book the distinction of being “один из самых уникальных случаев саморазрушения в литературе…” (“one of the most unique instances of self-destruction in literature…”). Alas, I can’t disagree. I attribute that problem to a lack of motion in the book. If a novel never really goes anywhere, it’s tough to write a logical ending. Only one plot line moves much: a somewhat hardboiled investigator, Kataev, a bachelor who loves creating meals out of frozen foods after a borshch-soaked childhood, investigates the murder.

But the other characters seem to exist for Sadulaev to stuff their mouths with dialogue about gender, duality, and philosophy, to augment Kataev’s research into intersexuality. It feels as if Sadulaev wrote “content” rather than characterizing or plotting, and the result is a lot of material, some of it moderately funny, that ends up feeling devoid of context and, ultimately, literary meaning.

The book also contains a passel of office words borrowed from English plus numerous cultural references, some satirical… Dale Carnegie (again!), Christopher Hitchens’s article for Vanity Fair about Mother Teresa, the Russian musical group ВИА Гра (VIA Gra) known here as “Фуa-Гра” (Foie Gras, get it?), and many others are all here. All told, though I found A.D. pretty disappointing, it was a fitting diversion in a hellish heat wave.

Sadulaev, Take Two: Tin House’s anthology Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker, contains an excerpt from Sadulaev’s book Я – чеченец! (I Am a Chechen!). I think I would describe the excerpt, “Почему не падает небо” [page down to find this piece of the text] (“Why the Sky Doesn’t Fall”) as a stream-of-consciousness piece that feels like fictionalized memoir as it describes the destruction of lives, families, and property during the Chechen War. “Why the Sky” is at once lyrical, mystical, and political, and its characters, despite small roles, feel far more memorable than anyone in A.D. because Sadulaev writes here about things that hurt. Anna Gunin’s translation captures the original’s combination of dreaminess and harsh reality.

Rasskazy’s brief bio of Sadulaev mentions that Harvill Secker will publish I Am a Chechen! in the U.K. in 2010. Amazon shows its release date as January 6, 2011.

I’ll be writing more about Rasskazy over the coming weeks. The book contains an interesting mix of stories by young authors, including Zakhar Prilepin, whose short story collection Грех (Sin) I liked so much, and several other book prize winners and finalists. Rasskazy will be released September 1, 2009.

Rasskazy on Amazon