Russian Library in West Hollywood

I fell across an article in today's Los Angeles Times about a Russian-language library in West Hollywood, consisting of 20,000 books donated by emigres over the past 10 years. The library is currently housed in the community center of West Hollywood's Plummer Park (misspelled by the LA Times), at 7377 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood 90046. According to the Times, the library is open from 11am to 1:30 pm on weekdays. I'll try to get over there on Monday. Until then, here is a 1999 article about LA's Russian community.

There Are Jews in My House review

Boris Fishman (see earlier post) reviews There Are Jews in My House by Lara Vapnyar in The New York Times:
In chaste, almost artless prose, she conjures up the inchoate lives of children grappling to make sense of the adults all around them.
Vapnyar, who was born in 1971 and emigrated to the United States in 1994, draws an indelible portrait of the land she left behind...Here is the Soviet Union as only its citizens knew it -- a junkyard of truncated aspirations, moral degradation, despair and inexplicable resilience, a place at once labyrinthine and explicit, dysfunctional and yet determined to survive.
This is Vapnyar's first story collection; I remember reading one of them, the humorous ''Love Lessons -- Mondays, 9 A.M.,'' in The New Yorker a while back.

Bookforum on Malevich

There is an article by Yve-Alain Bois in the winter issue of Bookforum about the expanding field of Malevich studies. Topics range from art market gossip (lawsuits, art laundering) to new discoveries and theories. Art historians are beginning to let go of the myths of Malevich and the Black Square, and look again, critically, at the dates paintings were done (versus what dates Malevich assigned them) and their multi-layered surfaces.

The issue also includes another article on Victor Serge. (See our previous post.)

LRB on The Dagaev Affair

The current issue of the London Review of Books has a review of The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia by Richard Pipes entitled "Raskolnikov into Pnin." It sounds interesting, but the article is only available online to subscribers. I guess I'll have to find a print copy.

Review of Shklovsky

A review in Bookslut of Viktor Shklovsky's Third Factory and the essay by Richard Sheldon that precedes the English translation.

Boris Fishman interviews

There is an interview with Boris Fishman (editor of Wild East, an anthology of recent writing located in Eastern Europe) in The Morning News. Over the past few years books about Americans in post-Soviet Eastern Europe became a very visable trend, and many of the fad's most notable authors are collected here (such as Arthur Phillips [Prague], Gary Shteyngart [The Russian Debutante's Handbook], Aleksandar Hemon [Nowhere Man] and John Beckman [The Winter Zoo]) Most of the included authors write in English, but the collection also includes Vladimir Sorokin and Miljenko Jergovic in translation.

There is another Fishman interview here.

St. Petersburm museums

Four St. Petersburg house-museums--Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Nabakov and Akhmatova--described in overly flowery language in The New York Times.

Literary Spokesmen

There is an interesting essay about the lack of a literary spokesperson for generation Y on MobyLives.com . Novelist Caren Lissner writes that previous generations had literary voices that represented them, "But Generation Y, the teens and early twenty–somethings who are said to represent the biggest chunk of pop culture marketing power, have no one who has encapsulated their generation in their writing so far." She puts forth a few names of gen Y writers, of which I have read only Jonathan Safran Foer, and says that none has emerged as a spokesperson. Lissner concludes that this may be a good thing and that it is probably too early anyways.

While I am interested to see what writers develop out of our generation (I'm 24), I'm not surprised there is no "literary spokesperson." First of all, I'm not really sure generation Y is a real generation distinct from Gen X. After all, our parents aren't in Gen X. They are Baby Boomers, for the most part. Second of all: yes, it is way too early to expect, or even debate a literary spokesperson of "teenagers or early twenty-somethings."

The Imperial Sublime

I spent some time in the Georgetown University library this evening reading the introduction to The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire by Harsha Ram. Ram is a Slavic professor at UC Berkeley (I took one of his classes during my last semester there). The Imperial Sublime, published this fall, is about the simultaneous expansion of the Russian empire and the development of Russian poetry, and their influence on each other--how the poetry, (mostly) celebrated the growth of the empire and helped to create heroic myths about it. The book covers the period from when Peter I (Peter the Great) declared himself Emperor (1721) to the death of the poet Lermontov (1841).

I found what I read of the book very accessible, although much of the literary-philosophical debate about the "sublime" went over my head.

Boris Akunin

Boris Akunin's The Winter Queen is among thousands on The New York Times notable fiction list for 2003. It was translated from the Russian title Azazel by Andrew Bromfield, who has translated at least one other Akunin book and a ton of Pelevin.

Russian Booker announcement

Yesterday the Open Russia-sponsored Russian Booker prize was awarded to Ruben David Gonsales Galiego for his memoir Beloe Na Chernom. Galiego was born in Spain to a Spanish mother and a Venezuelan father. His maternal grandfather was general-secretary of the Spanish communist party. From what I can gather, Galiego was taken from his mother when he was born (she was told he died), and raised in Soviet asylums for palsied children. As an adult he was reunited with his mother in Spain. Beloe Na Chernom (literally, White on Black) is his memoir.

Chechnya non-fiction

Another non-fiction review: Oleg Gordievsky in the Telegraph reviews The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire by Khassan Baiev and A Small Corner of Hell by Anna Politkovskaya. These are two books about the war in Chechnya, an extremely violent and disturbing conflict that has been largely ignored by Europe, the United States and the UN. The first book is by a surgeon in the region who has treated both Russians and Chechens caught in the violence. The second book is a compilation of reports by a brave journalist for one of Russia's few independent newspapers.

Today I stopped into the Kovcheg Russian bookstore on Sunset Blvd. in the Russian neighborhood in West Hollywood. The storekeeper was helpful and friendly. I didn't buy anything of note.

Christopher Hitchens on Victor Serge

Flying across the country today I caught up on some magazine reading, including the December issue of the Atlantic, in which I found an article by Christopher Hitchens about Victor Serge, a Bolshevik who wrote anti-Stalinist works. (Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev has just been reissued by NYRB, with an introduction by Susan Sontag.) Hitchens explains that Serge was born Victor Kibalchich in Belgium in 1890, and, after political disapointments in France and Spain, moved to Petersburg (Petrograd) just in time to participate in the Revolution. Although Serge lived in Russia after the revolution, he wrote in French and published abroad, allowing him a degree of freedom unavailable to other Soviet writers. Among other things, Serge is credited with coining the word "totalitarian" to describe the common traits of Stalinism and Nazism. He did not escape punishment, however, and was kicked out of the Party and later expelled from the Soviet Union. Many of his books, including The Case of Comrade Tulayev , were published after leaving the Soviet Union. Hitchens champions Serge as a political and historical figure who doesn't lose sight of what the Revolution was supposed to be about (For more on Serge's place in Russian and French literature, see this Richard Greeman essay.)

Victor Serge's other books include Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and Midnight in the Century. Hitchens also mentions a biography, The Course is Set on Hope , by Susan Weissman (another Hitchens review).

In today's New York Times Book Review, John Leonard reviews T. J. Binyon's biography of Aleksandr Pushkin. Leonard calls Pushkin "magnificent" and says Binyon, "a lecturer in Russian literature at Oxford, a senior research fellow at Wadham College and the author of a history of detective fiction as well as mystery novels of his own,...has practically inhaled all of 19th-century Russian culture, from school curricula to court etiquette to book publishing to adultery." This leads to many "beguiling," but to Leonard welcome, digressions. Pushkin didn't just sit around writing. He partied and dueled and slept around. He fell into and out of the Tsar's favor. He befriended and inspired revolutionaries, and then his "Byronic sympathy for Greek independence somehow metastasized into imperial bloodlust." Judging from the review this is a fascinating biography of a fascinating (and in terms of Russian letters, unequaled) writer.

This book is going onto my wish list.

I've added a perma link to the official (Russian) website for the Russian Booker, sponsored by Open Russia. The prize, also known as the "Little Booker" has been the premier literary prize in Russia since it was introduced in 1991. (At that time it was the first such prize not sponsored by the government, since 1917). The final winner will be announced December 4. The shortlist, announced last month, consists of six novels by little-known authors (in my own pidgin-transliteration):
Villa Reno by Natalia Galkina (Neva, 2003)
Beloe Na Chernom (White on Black) by Ruben David Gonsales Galiego (Limbus Press, 2002)
Iupiter (Jupiter) by Leonid Zorin (Znamia, 2002)
Frau Shram by Afanasii Mamedov (Druzhba Narodov, 2002)
Lavra by Elena Chizhova (Zvezda, 2002)
Kazaroza by Leonid Yuzefovich (Zebra E, 2003)

The 2001 winner, Ludmila Ulitskaya's Medea and her Children, was translated and published in 2002 in the United States by Schocken (I was underwhelmed).

Moby Lives links to an obituary of Ukrainian writer Georgi Vladimov, who has died at the age of 72. Vladimov's first novels were published in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and, after the second book was censored, he became a dissident and eventually emigrated to Germany. His novels include Faithful Ruslan and The General and His Army.

Here is the link to the Letter from Russia article discussed below.

Another article I found interesting in CONTEXT 14 was Daniel Green's commentary Empty Rhetoric: Innovative Fiction and the American Literary Magazine, which argues that most American literary journals do not publish much experimental writing, a premise that would surprise those more familiar with the reactionary arguments of the ULA and Dale Peck. Green also argues that American literary magazines should provide a space for non-academic criticism.

CONTEXT 14 has an in-depth article by Dmitry Golynko-Volfson that gives a survey of contemporary Russian literature.

The article discusses the flood of publications after the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of celebrity writers like Pelevin and Sorokin in the 90s, and the blossoming of a wider range of writers in the new century. The article concludes: "The arrival of the twenty-first century has been promising. Readership for serious Russian prose has grown, an award system is in place, a more democratic market has been established, and the Russian literary community has eagerly embraced these developments."

Note: The issue isn't on the CONTEXT website yet (and the print version lists a web address www.readcontext.org that doesn't seem to exist).

Sasha Sokolov is sixty. He is the author of School for Fools. Here is a birthday note (in Russian) to Sokolov.