Solzhenitsyn gossip
(link via ALD)

The San Francisco Chronicle relays the details of the continuing literary feud between Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Olga Andreyev Carlisle, the woman who helped smuggle out, translate and publish The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago.

The relationship between Carlisle, granddaughter of the writer Leonid Andreyev, and Solzhenitsyn dissolved in the 1970s, when he began to criticize her handling of the books. Carlisle has decided to publish her account of the relationship, Solzhenitsyn and the Secret Circle, in Russia for the first time after becoming aware of Solzhenitsyn's continuing criticism of her.

Irina Ratushinskaia

This past weekend at a local used bookstore I found a bilingual copy of A Tale of Three Heads by Irina Ratushinskaia, an Odessa-born Russian poet. The book is comprised of a couple dozen proze poems in the same vein as Ludmila Petrushevskaia's "fairy tales for adults," but more directly political. The stories are short and clever, mixing the banal and the fantastic. The title story is about a three-headed dragon. The heads agree to collectivize but then, in the resulting paranoid power struggle, one head eats the others. Other stories concern political arrests, blat (the Soviet system of bartering and influence peddling), and the difficulty of living honestly in a dishonest political system.

A dissident, Ratushinskaia was arrested in 1982 and sentenced to seven years in prison for charges related to her political activities. When A Tale of Three Heads was published in 1986, Ratushinskaia was still in prison, but she was released soon afterwords. She came to the United States in 1987 and her memoir, Grey is the Color of Hope, was published that year.

Ratushinskaia is often refered to as a Christian poet, but religion doesn't mark A Tale of Three Heads, perhaps because she became a devout Christian only in prison, and these stories were written before her arrest.

Some links:
short bio
essay on her Christianity
review of her novel Fiction and Lies
Publishers page for Wind of the Journey

New Shukshin film

So much for New Year's resolutions, huh? I guess I've been too engulfed in things closer to home to update this blog lately. Although I am working my way through Queen Ortuda, a strange mix of realpolitik and Disney princess magic.

Anyway, I learned today in my weekly email from rbcmp3.com that there is a new Russian film, "And they woke up in the morning..." based on an unfinished novela and several stories by Vasily Makarovich Shukshin coming soon to DVD.

Unfortunately, the Shukshin's classic "Snowball Berry Red (Kalina Krasnaya)" (which he wrote, directed and acted in--that's him in the upper right photo) is still only available in VHS and the European format DVD-PAL. I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen in a museum-theater in Moscow, and even though I couldn't understand all of it, Shukshin's portrayal of a parolled ex-con trying to reintegrate into society was incredibly moving.

New Year's Resolutions

I will attempt to continue posting a couple times a week at least. I will also attempt to find more of interest regarding contemporary Russian-language authors, and I will attempt to read some of their work in Russian.

Also, I have gone back and added headlines to posts to aid navigation. I have also added a sidebar on what I am reading currently.
I appreciate any comments from readers, links to new sources, etc.

New Lara Vapnyar story

Lara Vapnyar has a new story in The New Yorker. The story, "Broccoli," is about a deteriorating marriage in a Russian-emigre community in New York. The story, like Vapnyar's recently published collection "There Are Jews in My House" was written in English (see earlier post).

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.