***REGION 21: Europe III

If you have not read the information on the master thread regarding the intent of these regional threads, please do this first.

***21. Europe III: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania

Purge by Sofi Oksanen (2008, translated 2010) Written in Finnish by an Estonian-Finnish author

This is an ambitions, at times compelling, but ultimately flawed and frustrating book. It attempts to connect early 90s post-Soviet Estonia with the horrors of the wartime and early post-war years, when Estonia was first invaded by the Nazis and then by the Soviets, by bringing together a young Russian escapee from sex slavery with an aging Estonian woman living in a country village, and letting her memories unfold. Surprise: they both have things to hide and there is a connection between them!

There were things I really liked about this book, especially the beautiful depictions of the Estonian landscape and rural activities such as milking, canning, pickling, and making herbal mixtures, as well as the way Oksanen focuses on women's experiences under totalitarianism even though it is the men who are in charge. I also enjoyed learning more about Estonian history, and for the most part Oksanen is great at keeping the story moving along, even as she mixes up times and characters.

But, in the end, I was disappointed. The chapters about the escaped sex slave are incredibly graphic, and stand in too stark contrast to the tone of the rest of the book. In places, I just got tired of listening to the characters' endless thoughts and worries; a little more restraint would have been a good thing, and Oksanen could have benefited from a good editor. Some of the plot was either a little obvious, or a little contrived, and the motivations of at least one of the characters were a little hard to fully believe; other than the two protagonists, the characters seem a little one-dimensional. And, at the end, Oksanen includes some "documents" that either should have been worked into the story or left out. The ingredients are all there for a great book, but Purge isn't it.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov Originally published 1966; translation I read 2001. Russian.

I loved this book, but am having trouble figuring out what to say about it because it exists on so many levels: the literal, the fantastic, the satirical, the metaphysical, the humorous, the chilling, the theatrical, and the romantic.

The story begins when the devil, known as Woland, along with some of his entourage (including a large talking cat), comes to Moscow, presumably in the 1930s, and engages a poet and an editor in conversation about the existence of Christ (religion was completely forbidden in Stalinist Russia). From this beginning, the devil, in a not entirely unpleasant way, wreaks havoc in Moscow, mostly among the literary and theatrical establishments, and notably when he conducts a theatrical event of his own. The second part of the book focuses on the master, a writer, and his lover Margarita, and the pact she makes with the devil, which leads among other things to her acting as the hostess at the devil's ball. Interwoven through both parts is the somewhat distorted story of the crucifixion, from the perspective of Pontius Pilate, told first by the devil to the poet and editor and then from the book that the master is writing about that very subject.

But this book is so much more than the plot and another version of the Faust legend. Without ever mentioning Stalin or what daily life had become in 1930s Russia, Bulgakov depicts the horror and terror of the times through Woland's actions and people's responses. We see several of the other issues of the time -- housing, foreign currency, and of course bureaucracy -- through the lens of the story, as Bulgakov explores themes of guilt, love, betrayal, and, especially, courage and cowardice. His use of language - as translated by the admirable Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in my edition -- is wonderful, especially in some of the great dramatic scenes of storms, Woland's theatrical event and ball, and characters turning into witches. The story of Pontius Pilate both reinforces the Moscow story and comments on it: as Richard Pevear points out in his insightful introduction, terror is not a 20th century invention.

I could go on and on, but I will just note that my edition included very helpful end notes that identified many of the literary and other references in the book.

The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin 1983, translation 2008, Russian

For me, the most interesting thing about this book was its form: entirely unattributed dialogue, mostly extremely short comments by a variety of people waiting over the course of two days in one of the Soviet Union's iconic queues. Sorokin is trying to create the whole feeling of waiting in the queue: the boredom, the conversations, the woman annoyed with her child, groups of people leaving the queue for drinks or food, couples flirting, monitors urging the people waiting to line up more neatly or counting off their names and numbers for pages and pages. There are even blank pages where one of the characters (for characters do emerge from the seemingly random talk) passes out or goes to sleep, and at the end there is a scene, still in dialogue, that takes place outside the queue. What are they queuing for? We never find out, and in fact, the descriptions of the item change as the novel proceeds.

I found this book fascinating for its look at the queue phenomenon and for its experimental style, but otherwise it didn't really grab me.

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin

Love, sex and were-beasts in a satirical look at modern Russia with Eastern mysticism thrown in for good measure. A Hu-Li is a fox masquerading as human and earning a living by prostitution, hypnotising her clients into believing she will perform anything to satisfy their whim and desire. Brought to the attention of the FSB (formerly the KGB) it's there that she meets Alexander who proves resistant to her charms and also happens to be a werewolf. The start of their relationship will put a lot of people off reading this book but I should mention that none of the sexual acts mentioned in the book are described gratuitously.

I'd describe this book as being a Russian take on a Haruki Murakami novel, though more philosophical than fantastical in nature. Certainly not one that you can easily rush through in a day and I'm glad I had the time to be able to devote to it. While this book doesn't describe much of the country it does take a strong look at the political aspect often in a satirical form.

#6 - I'd agree with your comments on The Queue, which I have just decided to declare an abandoned read! I enjoyed it to start with, and there were some very sharp bits, but overall, like some modern art, it's more interesting to hear about than to experience personally...

Sorry, I had the link for Europe IV directing to here. I moved my books to their proper thread.

And I've finished The Time: Night by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, a short novel full of black humor told in the voice of the main character, a older middle-aged woman trying to control her out-of-control family while keeping everyone fed and clothed. Eventually, I'll write a bit more on this.

RUSSIA



The Time: Night by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (1992, T 1994, Russian)

Anna, whose full name sounds very much like a famous Russian poet (she's practically her namesake!), is trying to make a living as a writer and poet, while keeping her family fed and under control. Her elderly mother is demented or psychotic, her daughter keeps getting pregnant by different men (Anna already looks after six year-old Tima, the oldest of her grandchildren), and her son is just out of prison (and his "friends" are looking for him - the ones that he owes money to).

In an engaging, spirited voice, laced with irony and a dark wit, Anna tells us her story, which is both familiar and foreign. She's tough, fierce, and exhausted. Published in 1992, her tale exposes the (then) contemporary struggle of many Russians, particularly women, in sitcom fashion. Yes, I found it darkly funny, but ultimately heartbreaking.

I have an older collection of Petrushevskaya's short fiction that is in the TBR pile. I want to read this before I read the newer collection.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak Russia, originally published 1957 in Italian, new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky 2010

Doctor Zhivago is a wonderful, complex, and moving novel, but not at all what I imagined from my impressions of the movie, which I've only seen in parts and never in full. I more or less expected a traditional epic love story set against war-torn Russia, but I found instead a very modern portrait of a world falling apart and people struggling to survive -- both in general and in Russia in particular, from just before the 1905 revolution through the first world war, the two 1917 revolutions, the civil war, Stalin's early years and, in the epilogue, up to the turning point of the second world war. Through not only the protagonist and his circle, but also secondary and even incidental characters, Pasternak portrays the chaos, randomness, coincidence, hypocrisy, hunger, opportunism, and suffering of these times, with occasional glimpses of love, art, honor, nobility, and human decency.

The edition I read is the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky; in his informative introduction, Pevear notes that Pasternak was trying, as Tolstoy had, to capture the feeling of life as it is lived, and I believe he does so, with the episodic nature of the novel, the multitude of characters, the digressions from the "plot" and the protagonists, and the broad encompassing vision of the soul-destroying effects of war, power, and ideology.

Many themes and images run through the novel, but I was most struck by three. First, and again like Tolstoy and many other Russian writers I've read, Pasternak has a beautiful feeling for nature, from the red berries of the rowan tree to the way snow falls, the behavior of wolves, and a horse neighing because she senses another horse is nearby. The vast, harsh, and stunning expanse of Russia is another character in this novel. Second, trains play a big role, and are often not running: several characters trek huge distances through barren or forested land and one of the most striking images in the book is of dozens of trains buried under the snow, a reality nobody is supposed to acknowledge. Third, there is a religious theme, with frequent references to aspects of Russian Orthodox services and prayers (which I would not have recognized without the helpful end notes), a continuing and cyclical presence throughout the devastation of historical "progress." Along with this, several of the characters who are believed to be dead subsequently reappear, sometimes the same, sometimes dramatically changed.

I have written at length, but I feel I've only scratched the surface of Doctor Zhivago, without any discussion of the characters or the story. It is an amazingly rich and provocative experience.

Conquered City by Victor Serge Russia (but written in French). Written in 1931, NYRB edition 2011.

The conquered city is Leningrad in 1919-1920, ruled by the Communists (Reds), but threatened on all sides by the White Russian army and its western supporters, the "Green" fighters gathering in the forests, hunger, lack of fuel for heating or cooking and, perhaps most of all, by exhaustion from years of fighting. Against the backdrop of Leningrad itself, founded as St. Petersburg by Peter the Great as Russia's window to the west, and its glorious imperial buildings and natural setting, Serge presents interlocking vignettes of the population of the hard-pressed city: the hungry, frustrated, railway plant workers threatening to strike; the enthusiastic and dedicated converts to the communist cause; the cold and hard-working "Special Commission;" the spies, plotters, and informers; the criminals and prostitutes; the soldiers near and far; the remains of the intelligentsia, and more. In terse prose mixed with the language of official proclamations, Serge, a committed socialist who had to flee Stalin's Soviet Union, vividly depicts the philosophical and actual conflicts of the time, the hypocrisies and betrayals, the pressure to conform, and the struggle for individuality and meaning. Of the the three novels by Serge I've read, this is certainly the most intense.

We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin, tr. Mirra Ginsburg

D-503, a mathematician, is tasked by the government to carry out the building of the Integral, a space ship intended for visiting other Earth-like planets and propagating the utopian philosophy of the One State. It is far into the future and we, the human race as we know it, are ancient history. After a long protracted war, the old race is replaced by a new bunch of "enlightened" human beings. In place of impulsive, passionate, artistic individuals of old are robot-like peoples labeled by numbers and whose upbringing, lifestyle, and sexual schedule are controlled by an authoritarian government. Independent thinking, freedom, and love are all taboo. Conformity and reason are considered the highest of virtues. Nicotine and alcohol are branded as "poisons" that make one incurably sick. Every action is taken to prevent anyone from "developing a soul" - a most feared disease. There are indications that an epidemic of soul-searching is taking hold of some numbers held astray by rebels. But at last, the scientists of the One State have a long awaited breakthrough. They have finally developed a cure for the disease. A new medical procedure now makes it possible to exterminate the imagination. All numbers are now invited to undergo operation.

There is no doubt as to why this novel alarmed the Russian Stalinist government and their puppets and why it took a long time to be published. With a thinly disguised story decrying the repression of individual liberties and imagination, it could only be subversive and damaging to totalitarian states. The scientific methods applied to silence the "sick" citizens of the One State are akin to the purging of the rebellious minority in society, of the dissenters to totalitarian regimes, and of entire races by self-declared superior races. A great achievement of this piece of science fiction, written in 1921 and first published as a book in Russia only in 1952, is its ability to anticipate the political events in Russia (then and now) and in governments elsewhere, the methods by which freedoms are curtailed, and the inevitability and constancy of revolutions.

The translation by Mirra Ginsburg is okay but perhaps outdated. I'm distracted by certain word choices. The word "shaggy," for example, is oft repeated in the book. What's wrong with "unruly" or "unkempt"? But this is personal preference. One can't deny that We is visionary. It's a breezy read too. A novel with state of the art special effects.

Wandering Stars by Sholem Aleichem Yiddish 1914, 2010 translation by Aliza Shevrin

I put this review in this group because Sholem Aleichem was born in Russia and much of the action takes place in what was then the czarist Russian empire.

What a wonderful story-teller Sholem Aleichem (the pen name of Solomon Rabinovich) is! And how vividly his secondary characters jump off the page! Together, these make Wandering Stars a book that is hard to put down, even as the plot, such as it is, wanders as much as the characters and even disappears as much as one of the two main characters does.

The book starts in the tiny Bessarabian (now part of Moldavia) shtetl of Holeneshti when a traveling Yiddish theater comes to town. While this is by far the most exciting thing that has ever happened there, it is clear to the reader that it is also far from the top level of theater. Nonetheless, the town is enchanted, especially two teenagers: Reizel, the poor cantor's daughter, and Leibel, the son of the richest man in Holeneshti. Together, they fall in love with the theater and, on a starry night, pledge their undying love to each other.

The rest of the book chronicles their separate wanderings, especially Leibel's, who becomes Leo, through much of Jewish eastern Europe and then to Vienna, London, and ultimately New York where (SPOILER ALERT) they ultimately meet again, 10 years later, he as the biggest star in Yiddish theater acting, she as Rosa, an internationally renowned singer, each with complicated relationships.

But that is only the plot. On top of this thin thread of a love story, the novel spills over with the energy of the theater, the poverty of many Jews in eastern Europe, the competition of theaters and newspapers, the varied characters, the constant scheming, the plotting, the back-biting, the ambition, the betrayals, the love and friendship -- above all, the vibrant life. Admittedly things slowed down a little at the end, but overall this is just a fun, fun read, largely because of the amazing writing and vivid imagination of the author.

It is enhanced by an enthusiastic introduction by playwright Tony Kushner and a scholarly afterword by Dan Miron.

The word "shaggy," for example, is oft repeated in the book. What's wrong with "unruly" or "unkempt"?

She used "shaggy" for "hairy"--the hero is "atavistically" hairy, not unruly or unkempt.

Anna Starobinets : An Awkward Age
3.5/5 stars
Russia

Finally read my first book of the year and it's a collection of short stories by the Russian author, Anna Starobinets. This is apparently her first book and it was nominated for a prize back in Russia. I read this for Belletrista (which I need to write up a good review now).

I'm not one to read short stories so I don't quite know how to write about them but I think most short story readers would enjoy this book. It basically delves into our basic fears of our lives not turning out quite like we hoped they would. From an man who tries to escape his life by altering the lives of others, a child who we can see developing severe obsessive compulsive disorder to another man who's identity has been stolen but manages to find a new life until that new life is destroyed and he is forced to return to the original. It's all quite interesting. Starobinets is quite clever with her almost repulsive descriptions of the situations these characters find themselves that you almost want to close the book so that you don't have to witness the train wreck.

The star of the book is the story with which the book carries it's name, An Awkward Age. A twin slowly starts to deform and morph into a horrific creature, initially mistaken as a bad case of puberty, until his mother discovers his diary once he and his twin sister disappear. This one is disturbing.

My only real flinching came at how modern this books is. You know when the author uses the move "The Matrix" as a reference in her short story that you've reached a point of no return with literature. But perhaps that's just my own fear of entering a society full of warped people with no common sense of community or desire to show any sense of intelligence.

I know I'll probably stop reading contemporary literature once those books start to mention facebook and twitter.

> 16

You have a point. In that case I'd prefer "hairy." :p

A Double Life by Karolina Pavlova (1848 Russian, T 1978)

A Double Life tells a story of Cecily, a young woman of Russian high society who is of marriageable age.

Despite it’s somewhat simplistic storyline, A Double Life is a fascinating read on several levels.Written in 1848, the short novel tells the story of the naive Cecily, eighteen and marriagable in Russian high society. Cecily is lovely and appropriately talented; chaste and proper (did I say she had money?) —she has been brought up for this very moment. The story captures this high point in her life, the season she falls in love, her engagement and eventual marriage.

However, besides a picture of Cecily and her best friend, Olga; it is also a tale of their mothers, whose sole occupation it seems is to see their daughters married well. Olga’s mother is conniving and manipulative in a way that puts Mrs. Bennett in Pride & Prejudice in the amateur leagues. Enter on the scene various men, the choicest being Prince Victor. Olga’s mother wants the prince for Olga and fears he is attracted to Cecily.

Meanwhile, each night when she sleeps, Cecily, constructed creature that she is, expresses all that has been surpressed in her, through her dreams. The dream sequences are written in poetry. This is the double life indicated by the title.

Vera Vladimirovna was, as we have seen, very proud of her daughter’s successful upbringing, especially perhaps because it had been accomplished not without diffculty, since it took time and skill to destroy in her soul its innate thirst for delight and enthusiasm. Be that as it may, Cecily, prepared for high society, having memorized all its requirements and statutes, could never commit the slightest pecadillo, the most barely noticeable fault against them, could never forget herself for a moment, raise her voice a half tone, jump from a chair, enjoy a conversation with a man to the point where she might talk to him ten minutes longer than was proper or look to the right when she was supposed to look to the left. Now, at eighteen, she was so used to wearing her mind in a corset that she felt it no more than a silk undergarment that she took off only at night

The novel is more or less a protest to the limitations of a woman’s life at the time, of marriage being the unavoidable destiny. As a reader, one cannot help but hope that this passionate, subconscious part of Cecily finds some outer expression in her life, but the dangers of that can be seen in the author’s life.

Karolina Pavlova’s story, told in the introduction (I always read introductions after reading the book) is both heart-breaking and fascinating. Born into high society, she devoted herself to her art at a time when:

Poetry, as we have said earlier, was known to her (Cecily) mostly by heresay as something wild and incompatible with a respectable life. She knew that there were even women poets, but this was always presented to her as the most pitiable, abnormal things, as a disastrous and dangerous illness.

Pavlova suffered mightily for her art, and tragically died in the Netherlands, penniless and friendless. Pavlova was primarily a poet but also translated a large amount of Russian literature in other languages (she spoke nine), so it could be read and enjoyed by other Europeans.

There is much more that could be said about this short novel, the poetry in it, the author’s life, but I’ll leave it for your discovery.

#14 Rise
I like your review.

I found We to be a great book. Particularly intrusive was the fact that all accommodation was built with glass to prevent any privacy.

Orwell acknowledged We as an influence in his writing 1984.

The Fierce and Beautiful World by Andrei Platonov
Soul and Other Stories by Andrey Platonov

Platonov was a Soviet-era Russian writer.

As I was reading The Fierce and Beautiful World, a collection of one novella and several short stories, it occurred to me that the novella, "Dzhan" (which means "soul"), must be the same as the one included in Soul and Other Stories, which I also own. So I read the very insightful introduction to Soul and Other Stories by one of the translators, Robert Chandler, and learned that while they are the same, the version in TF&BW was a censored version that was published in the Khrushchev era, while Chandler had access to the full text of the novella and other stories. So I decided to read the later collection after I finished the first even though the majority of the stories in it, along with the novella, were ones I had read in the first collection.

Although I was impressed by Platonov the first time I read the stories, I was even more so the second time. I can't tell how much this was because they sank in more and how much because the translation was better and because Soul and Other Stories includes explanatory notes. Other than for the novella ("Dzhan," "Soul") I didn't notice any dramatically different material in the stories but there were definitely noticeable differences between the censored version of "Dzhan" and the full version of "Soul" -- not only additional material in "Soul" and references to Stalin that had been deleted in "Dzhan" but also other graphic or disturbing material, even material that doesn't seem to be politically sensitive. For example, a young woman who is described in "Dzhan" as having "sad eyes" is described in "Soul" as having a horsey face with boils covered by makeup.

Platonov is a beautiful writer, with infinite compassion for the poor and the outcast; the bulk of "Soul" involves a group of people living in the desert who are so poor and starving all they have left is their souls. He explores how people struggle to find happiness and what that is. He is fascinated by technology -- railroads, especially, and electricity -- with some of his characters able to work with machinery by feeling it, and at the same time deeply observant of the natural world, including both plants and animals, and how we humans react to it. Without his saying anything overtly political, it is clear to the reader that Platonov puts the individual and his emotional needs first. The stories require and deserve close attention.

Platonov died young, and Vassily Grossman, one of my all-time favorite authors spoke at his funeral. They are very different writers, but both are superb.

I am not posting a review of the disappointing Ice Road by Gillian Slovo here because, although it deals with the early years of Soviet Russia, it is by an English-speaking writer. If anyone is interested, I did post a book on the book page.

>22 rebeccanyc: That has sat on my shelf since it showed up on the Orange Prize longlist years ago. Slovo is South African, isn't she? Well, I'm sure your comments will linger in my head each time my hand pauses over it now...

Lois, you were the one who told me about it, I think, because Linda Grant wrote a rave review of it. And yes, she is South African (her experience with a repressive regime is touted either on the blurb or in something else I read). I"m not sorry I read it, but it didn't measure up.

The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov Russia Originally written in the 1930s, not published in Russia until 2000, translation 2009

This is a remarkable book, difficult to read and difficult to write about. In it, Platonov tries to recreate the world of the Soviet Union during the period of forced collectivization and the terror famine, not by describing it but by thrusting the reader into the midst of the chaos, unreality, and horror. A metaphorical fable, full of allusions to and direct quotes from both Stalinist proclamations and Orthodox liturgy (none of which I would have recognized without the translator's notes), it tells the tale of the building of a huge pit designed to support a home for the world's proletariat, a pit which keeps getting bigger and bigger with no building built, as well as a collectivized village from which the "kulaks" ("rich" peasants) are being "liquidated" and in which a bear is the hardest worker. Several characters come and go, including the apparent protagonist (although he disappears for part of the book) Voschev, who comes upon the pit after being fired from his job for thinking too much. Death is as normal as life in this novel; images of coffins abound, and many characters contemplate or even plan for their deaths, tired of and bored with living. At the same time, Voschev for one continues to search for truth and to value the meaning of individual lives.

The translator, in his helpful afterword, describes the book as being the one in which Platonov "did the most violence to language," and it is certainly true that his word choice is often startling and even confusing. I find myself thinking about this book now that I've finished it and trying to understand it, but if I hadn't earlier read and enjoyed the author's Soul and Other Stories, and known that this novel is considered his masterpiece, I probably would not have continued to read it, because the almost randomness of what happens makes it hard to figure out what is going on.

The Stalin Epigram: A Novel by Robert Littell

Robert Littell, a longtime master of the Cold War suspense novel (see: The Company, The Amateur, The Defection of AJ Lewinter) has brought his talents to this stunning account of the life and times of the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam.

Bristeling under the yoke of Stalinism, Mandelstam sets out to bring down the dictator through the power of his poetry. Discouraged by the more politically saavy Boris Pasternack and their mutual friend, Anna Akhmatova, Osip presses on encouraged by his ever loyal partner and wife, Nadezhda. In fact it is Nadezhda who submits to memorizing all of Osip's poems fearing that if they be written down on paper he would surely find himself imprisoned or worse.

Despite their efforts once Osip's Stalin Epigram is discovered he is tortured and placed in exile. Slowly drifting into madness he fears losing both his sexual desires and erection, and his ability to create through his muse.

Littell smartly weaves his tale through a variety of voices- Osip, Nadezhda, Akhmatova, Pasternack, Stalin and his bodyguard, and a curious, naive unknown circus strongman whose own imprisonment finds him at the crux of Mandelstam's despair and ultimate death.

In the end though, Stalin understands that the power of Mandelstam's poetry and words have the longer lasting power than do his own efforts of Collectivism and central power and control in Moscow.

The book is fast moving and well done.

At times it echoed two other books i have enjoyed:
Richard Lourie's The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin and Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. Regarding Lourie's book both depict an, at times, human look at Stalin; the common man behind the throne of power.

As to Bolano's work , Littell glorifies the power of poets and uses multiple witnesses to tell his tale. ( )

Russia: Dreams of my Russian Summers by Andrei Makine.
This is an incredibly beautiful story of a Russian boys who spends his summers with his French grandmother in Saransk in Russia. Through her eyes he not only learns about France and what it means to be French but also about what it means to be Russian. To call this book a coming-of-age-book would be inaccurate: it is so much more. Glimpses of 20th century Russian history, of what it means to feel like an outsider in society, of the importance and the meaning of language are presented in the most beautiful, delicate and thoughtful prose. This autobiography within a biography is one of the best reads of this year. Highly recommended.

Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin Russian, published 2008, English translation 2011

I read this stunning trilogy partly because I admired Sorokin's strange novel The Queue, partly because it looked intriguing in the bookstore, and largely because arubabookwoman/Deborah wrote a compelling review of it here. I can add little to her outline of the trilogy, so will only briefly summarize the plot to put the rest of my comments in context.

Basically, a troubled young man with a traumatic history discovers that the meteorite that devastated a remote region of Siberia in 1908 was made of a special kind of ice that can open the hearts of a special 23,000 people -- all blond-haired and blue-eyed -- who really have been created by rays of light, and that once he finds all these people they will be able to leave the world of the earth, which they consider a mistake, and join the light. Hence, he creates the Brotherhood of the Light and over the course of nearly a century, he and his successors gather these men and women and children into the Brotherhood. It is apparently quite blissful to be a brother or sister of the light and to be able to "speak" with one's heart to other brothers and sisters; they can only eat raw foods like fruits and have no sexual desires. However, after the death of the first two children of the light -- the young man, known by the "heart name" of Bro, and his first "sister," Fer -- the ability to sense if someone is one of them is lost, and the only method of discovering if a person can "talk" with his heart involves hitting him or her violently with a hammer made of ice; thus, a lot of people are killed in the process. Not only that, but sisters and brothers seek money and power to accomplish their goal, and that power takes them inside some of the nastier regimes of the 20th century -- Hitler's and Stalin's -- as well as into the corporate hierarchy at the end of the 20th and early 21st century. By the end of the trilogy, the Brotherhood has reached a pinnacle of power and wealth.

Sorokin uses a variety of techniques to tell the story: straight narrative, "testimonies," an at first odd but later meaningful use of italics, sections that seem like reporting, and jumps back and forth in time as well. While at first the reader feels happy for Bro and Fer, gradually the efforts of the Brotherhood begin to seem insidious and their attitudes towards the other people around them cruel. As compelling as the story is on its own, it seems to me that Sorokin meant it as a metaphor for all the political and religious movements that start out with bright ideals and then succumb to the lust for power and money, the use of violence to achieve supposedly worthy goals (the end justifies the means), and the denigration of the other. In that regard, members of the brotherhood start to refer to people as "meat machines" and to make fun of their needs for food, love, friendship, and sex. Sorokin is probably most intensely commenting on the Russian revolution and subsequent events in the Soviet Union, but by putting it in an imaginary context he broadens the perspective. And while, as noted in the earlier review, there are places where the reader has to suspend disbelief, all in all this is a compelling, beautifully crafted, and indeed virtuosic work.

Russia: L'Affaire Courilof (The Courilof Affair) by Irène Némirovsky

A relatively short book, more of a novella, staged at the beginning of 20th century Russia. A young revolutionary gets an assignment to kill a Russian minister. In order to do that, he has to work his way into the minister's life and gain his trust.
This book is less about history than about psychology as the young man starts to feel sympathy for the man he's supposed to kill. I thought this was an interesting premise, but I was slightly disappointed in the book because the story was too thin and improbable to support the psychological insights. However, I give it 3,5-stars because it did make me think about the danger and relativity of black-and-white-views and because Némirovsky's prose is so beautiful.

Russia: The Line by Olga Grushin

A husband, a wife and their son, each having their own reasons, wait in line to try to obtain a concert-ticket day after day, for months on end, along with hundreds of other people.
This book infallibly conveys the feeling of hope, despair and meekness that's typical of an oppressed society. It shows how bureaucracy is able to control people and make them do things a person normally wouldn't do, like waiting in line for weeks and weeks for an uncertain goal. However, I was slightly underwhelmed. The story never really grabbed me and neither did any of the characters. They remained too foggy, too distant and I didn't care about them (except maybe the mother of the wife). This book made me think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, at least the part in which Charlie's trying to get the golden ticket. It also reminded me of Quiet chaos in which the main character camps in his car outside his daughter's school for weeks on end. The difference with these books is that I remember I felt empathy for the main characters, something I never felt for these characters. I wouldn't call this book a miss, it's just that I prefer stories with delineated characters and/or a more gripping story. I guess if this had been a novella, it would have been ok with me.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2005, 2007) by Olga Grushin

I don’t know about you, but as I grow older, I rarely read a book with the total abandonment I used to experience as a child or a teenager. Olga Grushin, a young(ish) American writer who emigrated from Russia at eighteen, must have some special powers in order to cast this spell with both her novels, The Line and The Dream Life of Sukhanov.

The first thing that separates Grushin’s novels from those written by her American contemporaries is that, unlike them, she is still interested in something called “the human condition.” I am always puzzled by the fact that, while apparently political, most (relatively) young American writers, don’t integrate this interest into something one might call “our universal condition.” But then, how could they, when those of them who are in academia, are taught to run away from notions of the “universal” as if they were plague? On the other hand, many writers who integrate a contemporary political experience into their writings—usually poets—do this in such a righteous, sloganeering way that one is instantly tempted to become apolitical. I am thinking here of the numerous bad poems simmering with righteous indignation at W. Bush that I had to listen to during endless poetry readings.

All this to say that it may take a writer who has actually lived in a country where one couldn’t run away from politics, where every gesture ended up being political whether one was aware of it or not, to write in a mature way about the individual versus the collective, the singular versus the universal, fate versus will, and the relationship between the individual destiny and history. One cannot deal with such subjects when one has that nihilist ironic tone many contemporary American writers feel obligated to exhibit.

The historical background of The Dream Life of Sukhanov is that of Russia between the 1930s and the 1980s. The protagonist is the director of the main arts magazine in Moscow, and son-in-law of the most famous painter of day. Both titles implied a privileged position under communism, since one couldn’t get them without bowing to the Communist Party, and they came with numerous perks: access to special stores of the nomenklatura, a private chauffeur, etc.

Little by little, the reader is drawn into the hero’s dream life, and finds out that he had grown up in poverty and fear, having witnessed the killings of the Stalinist era and his father’s suicide. As a young man he fell in love with surrealism, and despised the official rhetoric and the socialist realist paintings depicting optimist laborers singing the beauty of their tractors. And then, one day he had to choose between continuing to be a poor, unrecognized painter, faithful to his ideals, and selling out to those in power in order to provide for his family.

At the heart of the novel is the choice, or rather, the question: what would you do if you had to choose? Sukhanov has to choose between killing the artist in himself and collaborating with the regime, on one hand, and keeping his artistic integrity, but having to survive by doing hard, low paid jobs, on the other hand. But choosing the latter also means committing suicide as an artist, since he wouldn’t be able to exhibit his paintings, and what good is a painting without a viewer?

In appearance, the novel gives us the story of a man who has betrayed his youth, but the closer we get to the end, the more we realize that the novel doesn’t have any easy answers, and that whatever the man would have chosen, he would have failed. At the end of the novel, a character introduced in the very first pages reappears: Sukhanov’s friend, Belkin, who had taken the opposite path, that of artistic honesty and everyday misery. Belkin, who is poor and whose wife has left him, finally gets his first show when he is in his mid-fifties, but then he realizes that he is a mediocre painter.

Until his world suddenly unravels, Sukhanov is rich, happily married to a gorgeous woman, respected (or rather, feared) by those in his profession. In the end, his entire world falls apart, and although as readers we know that he is justly punished, the author doesn’t give us a straight answer regarding the better choice. As Sukhanov’s wife says during their younger (and poorer) days, “There is more than one way to lose one’s soul.”

This is an extremely mature novel, and it is amazing that a writer who left Russia at such a young age can recreate so well not only the people’s daily lives and the country’s atmosphere, but the existential choices communism imposed on people. As rooted as the novel is in a particular time and place, this very anchoring makes it universal insofar as in many ways we are all products of our choices. Last but not least, Olga Grushin is a great stylist, and her paragraphs on art are among the best in the novel.

Russia Written in the 1920s. First published in French in 1993. English translation 2011.
The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

I've spent several days trying to figure out what to say about this novel, which has been hailed as a modernist masterpiece. Perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood to read it, because it left me baffled and somewhat cold. On the surface, it is the the story of a club of writers who have given up owning books or writing on paper, and who give themselves names that are nonsense syllables and meet once a week to tell each other stories, but stories based on concepts, not character or plot, or anything we think of as being necessary for a story. And the stories they tell range from science fiction about the creation of a world of automatons, to a riff on Hamlet with the Role becoming a reality, to a medieval tale told in a variety of ways about the Feast of the Ass and people not being who they seem, and more. Clearly, Krzhizhanovsky is commenting, both in the stories and in the concept of the club, on the soul-deadening and brutal Soviet world, but I just never warmed up to the book.

Romania
October Eight O'Clock by Norman Manea
first published 1981 in Romanian as Octombrie, ora opt
published in English 1993, translations by Cornelia Golna and others


A nameless boy in a nameless country is in the midst of a nameless cataclysm. Hunger, sickness and death are the defining features of his world. In this collection of short stories, some in the beginning so brief as to be only impressions, Manea traces the life of his protagonist from a small boy during the Holocaust, through a Stalinist youth, to middle age in Ceausescu's Romania. None of these periods is ever identified overtly. No person is named unless they were part of a larger group not directly affected by these eras.

The lack of defined markers gives the impression that life is something imposed and controlled from outside. Thus, the little girl Mara, a visitor to the family who was "...caught up in the catastrophe, mixed up with us and taken away" with them, should never have been detained. The group feels she must survive no matter what or they will bear the blame. Her death makes her one of them, and is the first indication for the boy that nothing can prevent what is going to happen. He becomes ill, feeling he is drowning.

Time in the camp is not marked other than by death; there are no other significant events. Eventually the boy and his family are able to return "...to the places from which we had been driven". Along the way, men and healthy women are temporarily separated from the children and remaining women in a railway station. It is a horrifying scene where the women and children do not realize that it is only for medical aid and food; the nurses are indeed real and these trains will help them in their journey back.

With the return to village life comes a whole new world of sensation: colour, noise, taste. Lessons must be learned. When the boy is twelve, an old man appears, instructed by the boy's family to prepare him for a nameless ceremony. The boy has no interest. His parents have already paraded him through a succession of weddings and other events to tell his story and keep it in people's memories. He bargains with them for a summer at a Soviet Pioneer Scout Camp if he goes through with the ceremony. Caught on film at camp in a propaganda feature, the boy is once more paraded as an example in cinemas throughout the country.

Later, at university, the protagonist finds himself in a voluntary work brigade for the summer. A Sunday excursion to the sea, which he sees for the first time, fills him with astonishment. He finally feels that he "...had been given something that could not be taken away". He will return to the sea in the years to come, years during which he descends into a form of madness; an isolation built to preserve him. The language shifts as the man ages. The clarity of language and events used with the younger boy is lost. Is he now confessing to an interrogator or a doctor? Is this affair in the past or in the present?

His reflections on a near drowning in one visit to the sea tempt him back to the desolate shore once again. His reflection: "If only the trains carrying them reached here...Had they experienced this felling of pointlessness, endlessness, they might not have chased after time so greedily", sums up the meaningless years of his existence.

Norman Manea was sent to Transnistria in Ukraine in 1941 at the age of five. Incredibly he survived the camp and the war to return to Romania, leaving for the US in 1986. This was a haunting collection of stories, to which I keep returning. I will look for other books by this author.

Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor's Son by Sholem Aleichem Yiddish Originally published 1907, 1916; translation 1953,

I am putting this book here because the author was born in the Russian empire and the beginning of the book takes place within it.

I read this charming and yet subtly pointed tale, which I bought in 1974 when I was taking a Yiddish literature in translation course, for the Club Read challenge to read a book published (in this case in English translation) in the year I was born. Mottel, who is about 8 or 9 years old, tells the story, starting in the Russian village of Kasrilovka and ending up on the lower east side of New York, with much wandering through Europe in between. He is a mischievous boy who loves to draw and who above all is an extremely astute observer of the people around him, not only his mother who is always crying (after his father dies at the beginning of the book), his brother Eli who is always scheming and never smiling, and his sister-in-law Brocha who has huge feet and is always talking, but his extended "family" (especially the wonderful young man known as "our friend Pinney") and everyone else he encounters. This is not a happy time for Jews in Russia, as pogroms are frequent; getting to America is harder than anyone expects; Ellis Island is a prison for a time; and life in New York is full of opportunity but takes some getting used to; but Mottel is full of life and eager to live it to the fullest. He is a delightful creation.

Having really loved Aleichem's Wandering Stars, which I read last year, I approached this book with anticipation, an was somewhat turned off by the translator's note. Tamara Kahane, who translated the edition I have, was Aleichem's granddaughter and notes in her introduction that "my primary task was to make him (Mottel) human and real to the English reader . . . I have therefore ruthlessly sacrificed strange rhythms and exotic expressions . . . To those who know Yiddish and the works of Sholom Aleichem in that language, I proffer my apologies for I know that they will be dissatisfied." Although I don't know Yiddish, the Wandering Stars translation seemed to capture what I think of as the feeling of Yiddish, and at first I was disappointed with the translation of Mottel as it seemed a little flat, not lively enough. But gradually, and especially as the family set off for America, I became captivated by Mottel and was no longer annoyed by the translation.

Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin
Russia Originally published 2006, translation 2011.

Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.

Far more accessible than the other works by Sorokin that I've read -- the experimental The Queue and the massive and stunning Ice Trilogy -- this book nonetheless exhibits Sorokin's dazzling writing and paints a damning portrait of power. It is 2028 in Russia and a new tsar is in power, with a regime that combines the worst of the original tsarist reign, Stalin's terror, and the corruption of the post-communist era. Russia has built walls around its boundaries and limits the flow of oil to other countries, while buying virtually all its products from China, now the other great power in the world. And the tsar has recreated the oprichniks, a secret police force modeled on the one employed in the 16th century by Ivan the Terrible; the 21st century oprichniks combine medieval methods of killing and torture with ray-guns, and drive around with the heads of freshly killed dogs on the hoods of their cars.

The novel portrays one day in the life of a high-up oprichnik, Andrei Danilovich Komiaga, from the time he staggers out of bed, massively hungover, until the time he falls unconscious back into it at 4 the next morning. In between, he participates in several executions, travels to Siberia and back, ingests a massive amount of drugs (including some bizarre hallucinogenic fish) and alcohol, oversees a cultural performance, visits a fortune-teller and the seductive wife of the tsar, negotiates "insurance" with Chinese truckers, bonds with his fellow oprichniks both mentally and physically, and reflects on his importance and his love of Russia. As Sorokin portrays them, the oprichniks are almost a cult, albeit an extremely powerful and extremely vicious one, getting together frequently to share meals and vices, and tossing out a variety of repeated phrases such as "Work and Word," "Hail," and "Thank God." Futuristic technology merges with old-fashioned fist fighting, as the oprichniks serve the tsar by putting down "sedition" while enriching themselves at the same time. Religion has made a comeback, and swearing is forbidden, but there seems to be no limit on killing, raping, pillaging, and indulging bodily desires, at least for the elite oprichniks. Power continues to corrupt.

Sorokin intersperses the novel with poems and songs, and I am quite sure that there are many references to Russian literature and history that I completely missed.

Author was born in ROMANIA, but is an ethnic German. The book takes place in Romania. Not sure where to post this, so I'm double posting!



35. The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller, translated from the German by Philip Boehm

I was particularly eager to read this novel because I've never read anything by Herta Müller, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. The author was born and raised in Romania, but left for Germany to escape the harassment and threats of Ceauşescu's secret police. Although Müller never experienced the Soviet labor camps to which many ethnic German Romanians were sent after World War II, her mother did. In addition to family history, Müller extensively interviewed the poet Oskar Pastior, a former deportee, in what was to be a collaboration. Unfortunately, Pastior passed away, and Müller ended up writing the book alone. This intimate knowledge about the camps lends an authenticity to the novel, which to me is essential when writing survivor literature and this type of fictitious, but personal narrative.

Leo Ausberg is seventeen, bored with small town life, and exploring his first sexual encounters when he receives an order that he is to be deported to a Soviet labor camp for five years to help with the rebuilding of Russia after Stalingrad. Others from his town have been "called up" as well, and Leo is secretly excited at the thought of traveling and leaving his provincial town and family for a while. With a gramophone case as a suitcase, Leo boards a cattle car for the East with a light heart.

The next five years in the coke-processing plant disabuse Leo of his foolish optimism and teach him many things: 1 shovel load=1 gram of bread, to let slip any hint of his homosexuality would mean death, and the cruel intimacy of the hunger angel. The long hours, the cold and heat, the abuse, and the lice are nothing to the tortures of the hunger angel. He encompasses the mind and subsumes the will. He promises to come back, but never leaves. Everyone in the camps has a hunger angel, and they dictate everything in the camps, from hunger-fur to morality. Müller focuses on this image as compulsively as the camp inmate thinks of food, and the reader is drawn into the mood claustrophobic obsession.

Although the beginning and end of the story are plot focused, many of the middle chapters most closely resemble essays. As Leo (and Müller) reflect on the ways in which camp life impact the way the mind functions, the plot falls to the side. These short pieces each deal with an element of camp life: shoveling, chemicals, boredom, a cuckoo clock, retribution of a bread thief. Although they are all tied together through Leo, I found that my reading slowed a little too much as I read one or two chapter essays and then stopped, with little need to carry on for plot's sake. As I neared the end of the book and the narrative became more plot focused, I finished quite quickly.

The Hunger Angel opened my eyes to the post-war plight of the Romanian ethnic Germans, about whom I knew little. I thought it was mostly German POWs who were sent to the camps. In addition, I enjoyed the language of the text , which is poetic, full of imagery, and poignant without being pitying. I look forward to reading more of Müller's work and have added The Land of Green Plums to my list.

Just getting caught up...

RUSSIA



27. A Country Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny

In the winter of 1916, the author Mikhail Bulgakov was a newly minted general practitioner, sent to a remote, rural medical clinic to be the region's sole doctor. This sink or swim method of internship was common in Russia at the time, due in part to the exigency of the ongoing Civil War and the desperate need for medical care in rural areas. Bulgakov spent eighteen months there, then specialized in venereology and moved to Kiev. Another eighteen months later, the Civil War forced him into the Caucasus where he left medicine in favor of writing; his most famous novel being The Master and Margarita. This book is a fictionalized account of his time as a young doctor in the rural hinterlands. Each chapter could exist on its own as a short story, yet they read chronologically as a novel.

The opening chapter, The Embroidered Towel, recounts young Dr. Bomgard's arrival at his post after a grueling twenty-four hour sleigh trip from the nearest town.

If you have never driven over country roads it is useless for me to tell you about it; you wouldn't understand anyway. But if you have, I would rather not remind you of it.

He is met by his staff: a minimally trained assistant called a feldsher and two midwives. Feeling completely isolated and unprepared for his life here, the doctor finally falls asleep in his new quarters.

I don't remember him arriving. I only remember the bolt grating in the door, a shriek from Aksinya and a cart creaking out in the yard.

He was hatless, his sheepskin coat unbuttoned, his beard was dishevelled and there was a mad look in his eyes.

He crossed himself, fell on his knees and banged his forehead against the floor. This to me!

'I'm a lost man,' I thought wretchedly.

It is a difficult case. The man's daughter has fallen into the flax brake, a machine for separating the woody stem from the fibrous part of the flax. If she is to live, she needs an amputation. But if she were to die during the procedure, a likely outcome, her body would be cut for naught. What to do?

This initial story sets the tone for most of the book. Ironic and funny, yet graphic in the descriptions of contemporaneous medicine and the Russian peasant's life: a life filled with superstition, fatalism, and stoicism. The doctor, straight from Moscow, is appalled at the ignorance and compares it to darkness in the third chapter, Black as Egypt's Night. The chapter ends with the thoughts of the doctor as he falls asleep.

'No, I will fight it... I will... I...' After a hard night, sweet sleep overtook me. Darkness, black as Egypt's night, descended and in it I was standing alone, armed with something that might have been a sword or might have been a stethoscope. I was moving forward and fighting... somewhere at the back of beyond. But I was not alone. With me was my warrior band: Demyan Lukich, Anna Nikolaevna, Pelagea Ivanova, all dressed in white overalls, all pressing forward.

Sleep... what a boon...

I enjoyed this book in all its moods: humorous, insightful, tragic. I loved the transition of the bumbling, inexperienced young doctor to a man more at home within himself and having a more nuanced understanding of his profession and human nature. My one caution is that Bulgakov does write with the biases of a man of his time and station. However, if you don't mind reading about medical procedures, I would highly recommend this book.

Excellent review of A Country Doctor's Notebook, Lisa! It reminded me of how much I enjoyed this little gem.

I enjoyed A Country Doctor's Notebook too. I have several more Bulgakovs on the TBR, and hope to get to them sooner rather than later.

RUSSIA White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
Written 1923-1924, originally published 1962, English translation 2008
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.

"Great was the year and terrible the Year of Our Lord 1918, the second since the revolution had begun." So begins Mikhail Bulgakov's tale of Kiev in the chaos of the Russian civil war. In the Ukraine, not only are Bolsheviks, the "Whites" (a loose conglomeration of anti-Bolsheviks of various stripes), and the Ukrainian nationalists under Petylura competing for control, but the Germans, who had put their puppet leader (the Hetman) in charge during the just ended World War I, are still hanging around. In the space of a few years, Kiev was to go back and forth among the warring factions at least eighteen times.

The story focuses on two brothers and a sister, Alexei, Elena, and Nikolai Turbin. Their mother has just died; Alexei, a doctor like Bulgakov, has recently returned from serving in the army; and Elena's new husband, Talberg, is on the verge of leaving to join a White general far away. The family lives in a large, cozy apartment, filled with books and memories; the beauty of the city of Kiev is lovingly described. But, as quoted in the introduction to the edition I read by Evgeny Dobrenko, Bulgakov wrote, in an essay on Kiev, "The legendary times came to an abrupt end, and history intruded, suddenly and menacingly."

In the novel, Bulgakov shows what happens when Petlyura's army of peasants from the countryside take over the city. In advance, the Germans and the Hetman flee, as do many of the army's officers and soldiers, leaving the city to scattered groups of eager but inexperienced and under-armed individual soldiers who are incapable of fighting the forces arrayed against them. Both Alexei and Nikolai become involved in the doomed fighting, along with some of their friends. The bulk of the novel covers just a few dramatic days. Throughout, we see not just the Turbins and their friends, but also the broader picture, the epic sweep of the nationalist forces (the countryside versus the city, the peasants versus the intelligentsia), the rumor-mongering within the city and the easy acceptance of the people of their new rulers, the antisemitism of the nationalists (heralding a pogrom under a later nationalist regime), and the abandonment of the city by the leaders and military. The courage and noble acts of the Turbins cannot stop the tide of history.

Bulgakov's writing is a delight. He paints a portrait of a beautiful, if legendary, city, and the stars and planets above, and displays deep familiarity with its streets and routes around and through it; he evokes the sounds of the phones and doorbells ringing, of cannons booming, of guns going off; he refers to Russian literature; he inserts a somewhat comic character in the form of a downstairs neighbor; he recounts his characters' dreams; and above all he brings to life the cold, the turmoil, the danger, the bravery and cowardice, the fear and love, of a confusing and frightening time. Like The Master and Margarita, it has religious references, in particular to the Book of Revelation (helpfully footnoted by the translator). This may be Bulgakov's first novel, but he is fully in control of the diverse techniques he uses to make this chaotic world real to the reader.

Although this novel could not be published in Russia until the 1960s, an adaptation of it became a play, "The Days of the Turbins," that became a Moscow hit and a favorite of Stalin's -- it must have been quite an adaptation, because there is no way that the book I read would have been acceptable to Stalin. I understand that this edition is the first complete translation into English of the novel.

And in the end?

"Great was the year and terrible the Year of Our Lord 1918, but more terrible still was 1919."

"What had it all been for? No one could say. And would anyone pay for the blood?

No. No one would.

The snow would melt, the green Ukrainian grass would come up and plait the earth, lush sprouts would emerge, the heat would shimmer above the fields, and no trace would remain of the blood. Blood is cheap in these dark red fields, and no one would ever redeem it.

No one."

RUSSIA
Happy Moscow by Andrey Platonov
Written in 1930s but unpublished in Russia; English translation 2012.

The book Happy Moscow includes not just the title novella but also other works Platonov wrote in the mid-1930s: two short stories, an essay, and a screenplay. I previously read and admired Platonov's Soul and Other Stories and The Foundation Pit, considered his masterpiece, but found it very difficult to understand because of the almost random way the plot jumps around and because Platonov's writing is both allusive and symbolic. I had the same problems with these works, although the translators' notes were again extremely helpful.

The novella tells the story of an orphan who is named Moscow, a beautiful young woman who starts off her career as a parachutist, symbolic of the technological heights to which Soviet Russia hoped to soar. Later she works underground on the subway, again symbolic of technological accomplishments. At the same time, these activities and the activities of other characters, including a doctor who is hoping to find a way to essentially keep people from dying and an engineer who works to find a way to make perfect scales, are reflective of projects that were actually happening in Soviet Russia. From this bright start, looking towards the future, the characters' lives become increasingly restricted and sad, both with respect to love and with respect to profession. In the intervening chapters, Platonov portrays some of the realities of life in 1930s Moscow, including a large market in which new identities, as well as food and other goods, are for sale.

After reading the novella, I turned to the story "The Moscow Violin." Much to my surprise, large chunks of text from the novella were repeated in the story, or perhaps it was vice versa, as Platonov worked on both at the same time. I found the screenplay, "Father," perhaps the most interesting piece in the book. And, although the translator calls the essay, "On the First Socialist Tragedy," "one of the earliest and greatest of classic ecological texts, for me it was more of an essay about the conflict between the individual "soul" (which has a greater meaning to Platonov than our English word) and technological prowess.

One of the interesting things about Platonov, besides his language and style, is the way certain themes and images recur. As in both of the books I previously read, there is a strong thread of technology and engineering in this collection: how railroads work, electrical plants, underground systems, medical advances (or quackery), perfecting instruments. Platonov is fascinated by technological advances. There is also a strong thread of music, especially in these pieces the violin, which finds its way into almost all of them. And then there is love, and love triangles, and people puzzling over what love means. Other repeated images and themes include orphans, attempted and successful suicide, and sparrows. Finally, there is a character in the novella who tries to will his own death, much as characters longed for death in The Foundation Pit.

As must be clear, I really didn't know what to make of the pieces in this collection. I was eager to read them because of my admiration for Platonov's work, but for the most part I struggled to understand what Platonov was trying to say. Anyone interested in trying Platonov should not start with this collection!

MOLDOVA

Mierla Domesticita: Blackbird Once Wild, Now Tame by Nicolae Dabija
Poems first published in Romanian 1992
English translation by John Michael Flynn 2012

Prior to its independence in 1991, Moldova was one of the constituent republics of the USSR. Though it's people traditionally spoke a dialect of Romanian, Russian was the official language in Soviet Moldova, and many people grew up speaking only Russian. Nicolae Dabija, as a politician, newspaper editor and poet, was one of the Moldovan's working to preserve the native language and culture. Barely a year after Moldova's independence, he published this collection of poems in Romanian.

But rather than celebrating his country's new identity and the restoration of its traditional language and alphabet, Dabija's poetry is an accusing cry of despair at how easily the people succumbed to foreign influence:

"I hear how in this world walk
Peoples without a language their gods tossed into a cart.

"Peoples who have no country.
What are they looking for? What do they want?...

"And if only to awaken after a time, dumb
and to learn the barbarian conquerors have finally left."

In the title poem of the collection, "Blackbird once wild, now tame," Dabija compares his people to a bird that voluntarily gives up its freedom:

"See this bird, once wild, now raised on grain
long ago it forgot how to fly.
See how the humble wind startles
her greasy, lethargic wings.
And in her eyes how the sky perishes....

"this voiceless aviator
who renounced a boundless horizon
for a feeder full of grain."

The first half of the collection consists of political poems such as these, some featuring scenes from folk life, others using mythological allegories.

The second half of the collection is mostly poems dedicated to a lost or recalcitrant lover. I found these to be substantially inferior to the political works, and almost painfully sophomoric at times. In one poem the writer declares that a millennium from now he will be nothing but a handful of clay that "shudders when touched by the clay you've become." And the shortest poem in the collection says only:

"I miss you
the way a wall misses a window."

However, one must give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that much of the beauty of language was lost in translation. The translator states, in fact, that he had to forego all rhyming in order to preserve the literal meaning. The text is bilingual, and you can see that every poem rhymes in the original Romanian, while none of them does in English translation.

There are several really good poems in this short collection. (My favorite is one titled "The Cat.") But it will be read chiefly because it is one of the few specimens of Moldovan literature available in English translation.

ROMANIA

DNF: One Moldavian Summer by Ionel Teodoreanu (1 star)

One Moldavian Summer is said to be one of the best books in Romanian literature. I sincerely hope that people are talking about the original novel and that it’s much, much better than the translation I read. If not, I have to wonder of Romania actually has any books deserving of the title literature! My copy was an English translation done by Eugenia Farca. It was published as part of the East European Monographs in cooperation with the Romanian Cultural Foundation Publishing House and distributed by Columbia University Press in 1992. So you would expect a fairly good translation. Alas, such was not the case. Verbs occurring in the wrong tenses, Mrs. instead of Mr. and he instead of she were common errors. Sometimes, words appear to be missing in a sentence. I hope this is just a reflection on the translation and that these errors do not occur in the original text.

But, aside from the translation issue. I did not like this book. The plot – there wasn’t one really – bored me to tears. I did not like two of the three main characters. Danut is a petulant little boy who lives in a dream world. Olguta is a spoiled brat of a girl. Monica might be the only one likeable, albeit because she’s a grey little mouse who’s a follower. But even her behavior started to get on my nerves. The almost telegram style of writing only underscored these issues.

I gave One Moldavian Summer 100 pages to convince me to read it. It failed, badly. I’m not convinced it's worth my time to read, so I gave up on it. I highly recommend any potential reader to pass this book by. It’s truly not worth your time to read it. All in all, a very disappointing experience for me.

RUSSIA



Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell

I am stymied by how to describe this book. Part science fiction, part social commentary, part history, it's a hodgepodge of styles and ideas. Each book is a continuation of the former, but with a different central character and sometimes a new style of writing. I found the book impossible to put down despite its size, and it's one that will remain with me for a long time.

Book one, Bro, is about a man named Alexander Dmitrievich Snegirev, who was born in 1908, the night the Tungus meteorite fell to Earth. Here the book and history merge. The Tungus meteorite is the largest to have ever impacted our planet and was about 1000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The shock wave is estimated to have been about 5 on the Richter scale and knocked down trees over an area of 830 square miles. The skies over Europe and Asia glowed due to ice particles in the air. In 1921, Leonid Kulik surveyed the area and in 1927 returned with a scientific expedition. The fictional Snegirev is a member of that party. Here, the story diverges as Snegirev enters one of the peat bogs and communes with a giant piece of ice just under the surface. He learns of his true nature through a near-religious conversion in which his chest strikes the ice and his heart is awoken. He believes his true name to be Bro. Soon after he meets a woman he suspects of being like him, and after awakening her heart, they travel together trying to find others of their kind. This first book is a wonderful description of the life of a wealthy younger son who lives through World War I, The Russian Revolution, and the Civil War. It is a rich blend of social commentary, history, and the beginnings of a religious commentary as well.

The second book, Ice, is the story of various members of the Brotherhood of Ice as they try to awaken people all over the globe. Without Bro and Fer to guide them with their ability to sense who is one of the chosen, the Brotherhood has to resort to crude methods of enlightenment, and many potentials die in the process. The style of this section is very different from the first book. Gone are the italicized words in almost every paragraph, replaced with bold face, and the writing becomes streetwise, with slang, swearing, and a brutal sound that echoes the rough nature of the people and of society under Stalin. This was a difficult section of the book for me to read due to the prevalence of drug abuse, sexual abuse and prostitution, and general brutality. But then in part two, the author returns to the narrative style employed in the first book, and we follow the story of Khram, from her awakening to her position as head of the organization and into her old age, from World War II through glasnost to Yeltsin. The Brotherhood is nearly complete; nearly all 23,000 have been gathered.

The final book of the trilogy, 23,000, begins with the final stages of preparation for the ultimate gathering of the chosen and the remaking of the world. The Brotherhood of Ice has moved beyond its violent methods of the Stalinist years to a modern multinational conglomerate which sells devices that awaken the chosen and makes billions of dollars to keep the Brotherhood funded and safe. From seeking political power, the Brotherhood now controls entire nations economically. Nothing, it seems, can stop them from achieving their aims. Two new characters are introduced in the third book, Olga and Bjorn, two of a small group of people investigating the Brotherhood. Their fate is inextricably tied up with that of the 23,000, and they are unsure if they should help them achieve their goals or thwart them.

There is so much that could be said about the social commentary in the trilogy: the way the story and even the writing reflects the time period in Russian history, the movement from political to economic power, the concerns of the everyday person at various points in time. But what I found most interesting were the religious connotations. Without giving too much away, the Ice from the meteorite, which Bro first discovered and communed with, is in some ways Messianic. It came to Earth for the 23,000 and helped them be reborn through itself in a painful, yet mystical way. Once awoken, the members of the Brotherhood of Ice feel as though they are on a crusade of enlightenment, a crusade that must resort to violence in order to awaken hearts and save those of the chosen 23,000. There are parallels to be drawn with contemporary born again Christians, and also to Buddhism, because the chosen have lived and died many human lives to get to the point in history where they can all be awakened at once and remake the world. There is an element of nature or science as the ultimate good and of the idea of original sin. There is so much to this book that it is definitely one that would continue to give on further readings. Based on this book alone, I would say Vladimir Sorokin is one of the most interesting and original writers I've read. It’s easy to see why he has been nominated for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. The winner of the prize will be announced May 22nd.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Originally published 1846; this translation 1996.
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.



I had a lot of fun reading this book and can't believe I've taken so long to read it it. Gogol, who called it a poem and not a novel, thinking of it, as the introduction to my edition points out, as a minor epic, takes his decidedly non-heroic hero, Chichickov, and the reader, through a series of encounters that humorously (and perhaps not so humorously) illustrate life in provincial Russia. It is wildly satirical and often laugh-out-loud funny, and yet there is probably much more than a kernel of truth in the characters he creates. Through these characters, and his delicious use of language, Gogol keeps the reader wondering who Chichikov will meet next, who he really is, and why he is doing what he is doing -- just as the people who meet him wonder about him.

For what Chichikov is doing is going around the countryside, always impressing people with his appearance and manner, and trying to buy "dead souls" -- serfs who have died but who remain on the tax rolls of their masters until the next census, thus representing an expense to their masters. Clearly, this is unusual, if not downright illegal, and the reader doesn't know until the last chapter of the first part why Chichikov is doing it. Everywhere, people are charmed to meet him, and he makes inroads into the cream of provincial society, but of course he encounters obstacles and, despite his resourcefulness, eventually serious enough ones to make him leave town. In the second part of the book, which is unfinished and incomplete (Gogol burned a lot of it just before his untimely death), some years have passed, Chichikov is in another part of the country, engaging in other schemes and meeting other odd characters; however, this part doesn't have the manic energy of the first part.

What we see in the people Chichikov encounters is a cross-section of provincial Russia: corruption, greed, mismanagement, suspicion, cruelty, the desire to do good without knowing how, class distinctions, downright nuttiness, and absurdity. It is clearly a society that could be doing a lot better than it is. One of the weirdest sections involved a landowner Chichikov meets (in the unfinished second part) who has organized a whole bureaucracy on his estate, one that needless to say doesn't work, and that sounds a lot like the Soviet bureaucracy that wouldn't come on the scene for another 70 or 80 years.

It's hard to say whether the best part of this book is the characters, the satire, or Gogol's language. As he writes:

A knowledge of hearts and a wise comprehension of life resound in the word of the Briton; like a nimble fop the short-lived word of the Frenchman flashes and scatters; whimsically does the German contrive his lean, intelligent work, not accessible to all; but there is no word so sweeping, so pert, so bursting from beneath the very heart, so ebullient and vibrant with life, as an aptly spoken Russian word." p. 109

And to give a feeling for Gogol's sometimes understated satire:

"Not hindered, however, by the lawyer's skeptical appearance, Chichikov explained the difficult points of the matter and depicted in alluring perspective the gratitude necessarily consequent about good counsel and concern.

To this the lawyer responded by depicting the uncertainty of all earthly things, and artfully alluded to the fact that two birds in the bush meant nothing, and what was needed was one in the hand. p. 360

I could go on and on, but I'll just note that the edition I read was translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose translations of other Russian authors I have also thoroughly enjoyed. There is an even newer translation, published by NYRB (whose books I nearly always like), but I decided to stick with the tried and true. If I had all the time in the world, it would be interesting to compare the translations.

RUSSIA
Red Spectres: Russian Gothic Tales from the Twentieth Century, selected and translated by Muireann Maguire
Stories written from 1903 -1927; English translation 2013



I bought this book when I saw it in the bookstore because I read a lot of Russian, including Soviet era, fiction, and I was intrigued that this collection included stories by writers I knew (such as Bulgakov and Krzhizhanovsky) as well as authors I was unfamiliar with. These writers were taking a chance by not toeing the party line about realistic fiction, and in fact many of these stories were not published in the USSR during the authors' lifetimes and one author, was killed in the 1937 purges. However, although some of the stories were enjoyably creepy and thought-provoking, I guess it takes a lot for me to appreciate tales of the supernatural. I kept on reading because each story was different (although two involved people emerging from mirrors and pushing the "real" person into the mirror), and I kept hoping I would like them more. I believe this is a case of my personal taste, and that the stories would be much more compelling for someone who likes this kind of fiction more than I do.

RUSSIA

A Dead Man's Memoir (A Theatrical Novel by Mikhail Bulgakov
Written in the 1920s and 1930s; originally published 1965; English translation 2007.
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.



In this short semi-autobiographical novel, Bulgakov satirizes the famous Moscow Art Theater and his experiences transforming his novel The White Guard (about an upper class family from Kiev during the civil war, from a very White perspective) into a play, The Days of the Turbins, that could be acceptable to the censors (indeed, even Stalin became a fan of the play). The conceit of the novel is that the novelist turned playwright Maksudov, before he threw himself off the Tesepnoi Bridge, sent these memoirs to the writer, hence "a dead man's memoir"; it has also been translated under the title Black Snow, which is the title of Maksudov's play in the novel.

The novel is clearly extremely witty, although I had to rely on the notes to see who all the characters are really based on, and I'm sure this would have been much more fun for readers familiar with the cast of characters of the 1930s Moscow theater scene. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it, and even laughed aloud at certain points. Even without having a grasp of who the "real" people were (although one of the co-directors of the Theater is Stanislavsky, famous for developing "method" acting), I appreciated the insight into the craziness of the theater: the dislike of the two founders for each other (and the absence of one of them, although he sends telegrams with advice), the difficulty of staging new works featuring younger characters with the aging actors instead of always performing classics, the peculiarities of individual actors, the censor's desire to completely change the characters and the plot of the play, the amazing abilities of the typist/office manager, the jealousy of other writers, although one gives him sage advice about dealing with the censor (who, by the way, is called the Head of Internal Order).

" 'What you ought to have done is not argue,' Bombardov said quietly, 'and reply like this: 'I am very grateful to you for your guidance, Ivan Vasilievich, I will definitely put it into effect.' You must not object, do you understand that or not? At Sivstev Vrazhek Lane nobody objects."

'How is that possible? Nobody ever objects?'

'Nobody, not ever,' Bombardov replied, tapping out each word. 'Nobody every has, nobody does, and nobody ever will.'" p. 113

The book gathers speed as it goes on, and it is occasionally difficult to remember all the characters, so the total effect is of barely contained chaos and the insanity (and worse) of the theater world and the effects of the Soviet system on it. This book doesn't stand up to The Master and Margarita or The White Guard but it is full of entertaining yet horrifying scenes of the creative life, such as it was, of 1920s and 30s Moscow.

RUSSIA

The Captain's Daughter by Alexander Pushkin
Originally published 1836; English translation 2014



What a delight it was to read Pushkin for the first time, and in an edition (NYRB) that had such an interesting introduction and helpful notes by the translators (Robert and Elizabeth Chandler). This is first and foremost an exciting read, about a young man, Pyotr Andreich, who is sent by his father off to the steppes to join the army defending the rule of Catherine the Great against a Cossack rebel, Pugachev, who claims to be her dead husband and therefore the legitimate emperor. Pyotr has various mishaps before reaching the fort where he is to be stationed, and against the wishes of his family's servant, who is accompanying him, gives his (outgrown) hare-skin coat to an apparently down-at-his heels peasant. The fort turns out to be not much of a stronghold, with a lackadaisical captain who in fact lets his wife run things, and some barely trained soldiers. Pyotr falls in love with the captain's daughter, Maria (or Masha), fights a duel, the Cossacks attack and overrun the fort, traitors abound, and much much more ensues before the novella reaches a dramatic (fairy tale?) and romantic ending,

What I perhaps would not have realized without the Chandlers' introduction and notes was how intricately Pushkin weaves this tale, with repetitions of events, people who turn out to be not who they seem to be, letters that are treasured and letters that are torn up, historical accuracy (he also wrote an historical work about the Pugachev rebellion), and allusions to other works of Russian literature. These added immeasurably to my appreciation of Pushkin and the novella. This edition was also enhanced by brief essays at the end about Pushkin and history and the challenges of translating him. I will certainly be looking for more works by Pushkin.

The Best of Sholom Aleichem by Sholom Aleichem
(First published 1979. Edited by Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse.)

This anthology was pure reading pleasure. To anyone who, like me, has heard of Sholom Aleichem, and is probably familiar with his character Tevye the Dairyman from the successful 'Fiddler on the Roof' musical play/film - an adaptation of some of the 'Tevye's Daughters' stories, but who has not previously read his work; if you enjoyed that character - and want a bit more - then as far as I can tell you're in for a treat with much of what he wrote. 'The Best of' includes twenty-two stories from his work - many of which are newly translated here with previously omitted material, as well as three appearing in English for the first time.

These hugely enjoyable stories while on the one hand entertaining, are on the other also a moving illumination of a culture now vanished of course, that of the shtetl - the small Jewish semi-rural communities of eastern Europe that were scattered like salt and pepper throughout the Russian Empire's 'Pale of Settlement' and the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That small planet of a Yiddish speaking people, the 'old country', their villages and inns, their prayer-houses and bath-houses, the chicken yards, tailors' workshops and market places where they worked, as we know had pretty much all gone by the mid-20th century - ending predominantly in either mass emigration or mass extermination. Reading these stories will momentarily recreate that lost world.

As the editors suggest in their epistolary introduction (which I found extremely worthwhile reading having finished the stories first) - If you follow the line of the plot, {referring to the Tevye stories} it traces nothing less than the breakup of an entire culture. ... Tevye, who is actually defenceless against the barrage of challenges and attacks that lay him low, should have been a tragic victim. Instead, balancing his losses on the sharp edge of his tongue, he maintains the precarious posture of a comic hero.

Sholom Aleichem - the pen name of Solomon Nahumovitch Rabinovitch (1859-1916)- was a master humourist. A master of character, of setting, of timing, of leaving you wanting more - everything you would want from a great teller of tales. This collection - clearly a labour of love for the academic editors Ruth R. Wisse and Irving Howe - is not just a selection of the Tevye stories - not that I'd be complaining - but effectively is a retrospective representation of his different story themes and many memorable characters that he created. There's Shimon-Eli a haunted tailor, Mottel the cantor's son, Benjamin Lastetchke (the richest man in Kasrilevke. There is no end to his greatness!) and the Krushniker delegation to name a few. The fictional shtetl of Kasrilveke itself is perhaps his greatest creation of all. He takes you there with just a few strokes of his pen. The honest hard-working mensch, the idle beggar, the gossip, the unfortunate entrepreneur, the fool, the con-artist, the sage, the spirit of beloved grandparents long gone - they're all here.

But don't read Sholom Aleichem if a little chauvinism here and there offends. Tevye the milkman has a wonderfully mischievous line in matrimonial put-downs:

"What do you say?" I ask my wife. "What do you think of his proposition?"

"What do you want me to say?" she asks. "I know that Mencachem-Mendel isn't a nobody who would want to swindle you. He doesn't come from a family of nobodies. He has a very respectable father, and as for his grandfather, he was a real jewel. All of his life, even after he became blind, he studied the Torah. And Grandmother Tzeitl, may she rest in peace, was no ordinary woman either."

"A fitting parable." I said. "It's like bringing Chanukah candles to a Purim feast. We talk about investments and she drags in her Grandmother Tzeitl who used to bake honeycake, and her grandfather who died of drink. That's a woman for you. No wonder King Solomon traveled the world over and didn't find a female with an ounce of brains in her head."

One of the stories translated here for the first time - "The Krushniker Delegation" - highlighted a different aspect of his work that particularly interested the history buff in me. The editors write that being written toward the end of his life, it deals with the experiences of east European Jews caught in the First World War between Germans and Poles. Elements of the traditional Sholom Aleichem are still there, but the tone and substance have changed - ...as if the great humourist is giving way before the blows of modern history. There is a dark edge to his writing that surfaces and has a knack of almost catching the reader off-guard.

From the story 'Once There Were Four' - a frame tale (with the author as one of the eponymous characters along with three of the greatest Jewish writers of the age) in which four "anecdotes" on the subject of forgetting reveal how even those great writers are revealed as ordinary, anxious Jews, faltering and trembling in ordinary, if not humiliating circumstances:

There are moments you want to forget, to blot out from memory - but it is impossible. We forget what should be remembered and remember what should be forgotten. That, in a nutshell, is the moral of the story. Now it's someone else's turn.

crossposted from Club Read 2015

BASARABIA (part of Romania)



My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest by Paul Goma, translated from the Romanian by Angela Clark
first published in French as Le Calidor in 1987, then published in Romanian in the Federal Republic of Germany

That children understand things differently than adults is a given. Language mastery, experience, prejudice and memories of other events all go into adult judgements. Lacking these modifiers, does a child sometimes see more clearly?

The four year old boy watched the villagers from the raised porch of his home as they scrambled to flee Basarabia in 1940, after its surrender to the Russians. His father scurried around the yard below, while his mother doggedly loaded the cart with their belongings. It was true what the boy saw; Father was not helping. He was deliberately pretending to do other things so that the departure would be delayed.

The Goma family wound up unable to flee. It was too late by the time the cart was ready. Years later the boy asked his father why he delayed. Father was a teacher, a student of history. He could not leave because he had built the house and school with his own hands, bought the books with his own money. He wanted to teach the local peasants their nation's history as long as he could. Even as he explained all this to his son, he did it in the form of a history lecture.

The war years were not good years for the Goma family. They suffered for Father's obstinacy. When Father was arrested in 1941, and sent to a Soviet camp, even the child knew he and his mother were suffering due to Father's action, although that was never said out loud. Their only help came from the peasant mayor of the village, Old Iacob and his wife Aunt Domnica, at some risk to themselves.

It is the adult Goma looking back at his childhood who tells the story as the child saw it. The first time I read the book a month ago, I was struck by this view of war and occupation. Going over it today, it was the history narrated by the father that struck me; the history of repeated invasions and surrenders, of successive rulers and occupiers of this small part of the world.

It wasn't just this national history that repeated. Personal history repeated too. Like his real and fictional father, Paul Goma was imprisoned by the authorities and spent time being re-educated. He was banned and now lives in exile in France. His novel is his history and his remembrance of the time when a small boy sat outside on the calidor and watched and learned his first lessons.

And I can still remember. And I can. And I.
And - nothing. Because we had to leave.
And when you leave, you die, that's what they say.

I read to the Jewish Pale of Settlement, and more specifically Russia during the last years of the Tsars, via the collection of Sholom Alecheim's brilliant short stories titled Tevye's Daughters.

I most highly recommend this collection of stories illuminating Jewish village life in Russia during the very late 19th/very early 20th century as the culture erodes due to the pressures of encroaching modernity and ever-more-punitive anti-Semetic laws. Not all of the stories in this collection deal with the experiences and tribulations of Tevye the dairyman, a character made familiar by the rendering in the musical, Fiddler on the Roof. The Tevye stories, six or seven in all, are scattered throughout the collection and certainly provide the collection's backbone.

This morning I finished The Appointment by the Nobel Prize winning Romanian author Herta Müller. This novel takes us into the soul-numbing world of life in Romania under Ceausescu's totalitarian Communist rule. It is the details of a drab and fear-ridden life, which nevertheless cannot entirely suffocate the human spirit, that so skillfully build this harrowing world, rather than anything graphic or extreme. This is a beautiful if saddening book.

I finished The Zelmenyaners: a Family Saga by Moyshe Kulbak. The Zelmenyaners is considered a classic of Yiddish literature. The novel is a comedy spanning several generations of an extended Jewish family in Minsk, the capitol city of Byelorussia (now Belarus), but centering on the period from 1926 through 1933 or so. The family all lives together, in a single courtyard on the outskirts of town originally built by the family's patriarch, one Reb Zelmen, who came to the city from somewhere in "deep Russia" in the 1870s. By the time the action of the novel begins in the late 1920s Reb Zelmen has died, though his widow lives on, and the family is led by Zelmen's four sons, whose own children and sons and daughters-in-law and their children populate the courtyard's many old buildings. (One building is even made of brick!)

The tale centers around the older generation's desires to retain their old ways, including the vestiges of their Jewish beliefs and practices, in the face of the growing incursions of Soviet society and economic collectivisation. The story is in fable-like, farcical narrative. Rumor, scandal and gossip, feud and loyalty, busybodies and misanthropes swarm and swirl about the courtyard. Knowledge of the outside world is minimal, sometimes comically so, for most of the Zelmenyaners. Our affection for this crowd is cemented early on, and though the story is played for comedy, the pathos is evident throughout as the family fights a losing battle to retain their way of life, their heritage and their family identity in the face of societal forces from without and betrayal from within.

Adding poignancy to the reading was this note on the book's back cover:

Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) was a leading Yiddish modernist poet, novelist and dramatist. He was arrested in 1937, during the wave of Stalinist repression that hit the Minsk Yiddish writers and cultural activists with particular vehemence. After a perfunctory show trial, Kulbak was shot at the age of forty-one.

Andre Kurkov is my probably my favourite author. He lives in Ukraine and this ups and downs of this country are always part of his novels. His latest Grey Bees is a fable-like tale that involves the war with Russia in Eastern Ukraine and Russia's annexation of Crimea and, I think, is one of his best. He creates a human story among the politics brilliantly.

Russia

There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya; introduction & translation from Russian by Anna Summers


cover comments: I was drawn to this fabulous title and it's twisted fairy tale promise. This Penguin edition has a lovely tactile feel. Full marks to book design.

Comments: Seventeen short stories over 171 pages that cover life in late- and post-Soviet Russia. These "love stories" all centre on the lives of women--mostly mothers--living in dingy apartments with ungrateful adult children, cheating alcoholic husbands, and difficult older aunts and parents. There's a dark humour to them, but not enough to raise them over the flat voice that kept me from connecting to the stories.

Why I Read This Now: I love a good riff on a fairy tale, and when chanced to look at this on Valentine's Day and saw the "Love Stories" pop on the cover, I thought this was the perfect time. The "love" part of the stories was too tongue-in-cheek for me.

Rating: I can see why some readers like these stories, but they didn't do much for me. 2.5 stars. At least it was a quick, easy read.

RUSSIA



Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol, translated from the Russian by Peter Constantine
Published 1835 and revised 1842, this translation 2004, 141 p.

Taras Bulba is the epitome of a Cossack: brave, reckless, and passionate about upholding the dignity of the Russian Orthodox faith. His two sons have just returned from a seminary in Kiev, where a rudimentary education was beaten into them, and he is eager to initiate them into the violent comradeship that is the life of the Dnieper Cossacks. Leaving behind their weeping mother, they head for the Zaporozhian stronghold, where they join in a revolt against the Catholic Poles, who are trying to subjugate the Ukraine.

Written by Nikolai Gogol in the 1830s, Taras Bulba is the quintessential romance about the mythologized Ukrainian Cossacks. In it, Gogol attributes their violent emotions and selfless comradeship as the wellspring for the Russian soul. It is a classic war epic eulogizing the wildness of unfettered hatred for the Other.

As a piece of literature, it is exceptional writing, unlike anything else that Gogol wrote. Hemingway claimed it was one of the "ten greatest books of all time." I read it now, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, thinking to understand more about the region. Instead of a historical novel, however, I encountered an epic in verse glorifying the proto-Russian. I was startled by the vehement hatred of Muslims, Catholics, and, especially, Jews. Prior to this I had only read Gogol's short stories, full of magical realism and surreal absurdism.

The Modern Library Classics edition that I have includes an interesting introduction by Robert D. Kaplan. In it he writes that Americans have been too trusting in rationalism to move people toward individual rights and democracy. The reality is that humans have irrational romantic and heroic tendencies, but these are subverted by the "crude belief systems and symbolism that sustain what the national security analyst Ralph Peters has called 'euphorias of hatred.'" He quotes Elias Canetti as writing, "The crowd needs a direction... It's constant fear of disintegration means that it will accept any goal." Gogol's Cossacks capture both the violent hatred inherent in the crowd-pack and the heroism and romanticism of the individual. I found it an important, if disturbing, read.

Russia, Soviet Union,

Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trostky

To be honest, I did not understand much of this book, although I did read several chapters twice. I think this was in defense of killing as long as it furthered the revolution and it was done by the proletariat. Trotsky defended the killing of the Czar & his family but condemned the killing of his sons by Stalin. 126 pages 3 stars

This was published in 1938, just 18 months before Trotsky was killed.

Lithuania

When I was looking for books about Vilnius before our trip in April, I came across this beautiful one published by Hanser Verlag: Die Straßen von Wilna by Czesław Miłosz. The curious thing is that I wasn't able to find any other information about the book and its contents. It is not included in the bibliographies of Czesław Miłosz that I found, and I don't know if it is a work standing on its own (it looks like it from the publishing information included in the book) or a collection composed by Hanser (which somehow seems more likely to me). Moreover, there is an English version shown on LT (Beginning with my streets), but upon a closer look, this is an entirely different book containing different texts, at least in part.
Well, I read this one and I liked it very much.



"Die Straßen von Wilna" by Czesław Miłosz
Original Title: Miasto młodości / Vilnius - Wilno - Vilnia / Dykcyonarz wilénskich ulic / Platońskie dialogi / Dialog o Wilnie
First published in 1997 (this edition/German translation at least)
Rating: 4 1/2 stars - ****°

This book consists of three parts that are interspersed by a couple of poems. In the first part, the author gives an overview of the history of the city, and like that, of Lithuanian history. This might sound a bit dry, but it is not, because Miłosz is a masterful storyteller and thus, this slice of history is immensely readable and highly fascinating. To be honest, I think most historical facts that I remembered during our trip came from this chapter and not from the travel guide we also had with us.
The second part is a description of some of the streets of Vilnius. Miłosz, who spent parts of his childhood and later also studied there, connects the streets with his personal memories, and thus, he paints a somewhat nostalgic picture of Vilnius before World War Two. He writes about the activities he took part in as a child, the people he met, the buildings and atmosphere of the streets.
The third part includes a letter Miłosz wrote to the writer Tomas Venclova, and Venclova's reply. Venclova is an ethnic Lithuanian, unlike Miłosz, who was of Polish descent and wrote in Polish (and is considered a Polish author). These two letters cover a lot of ground and deal with Lithuanian history, with many other writers the two have known, and especially with the ciity's position between Polish and Lithuanian culture, its unique status of being a provincial town, but also a capital, its changing hands for so many times. There are many interesting - and still relevant! - thoughts in these letters, especially when the writers reflected on possibilities of the future. The letters were written in the late 1970s, and they hoped for a democratic Lithuania with Vilnius as its capital, but also feared that nationalism would remain a danger to Europe. It was almost eerie to read their predictions now, 45 years later.

>57 Tess_W:

Trotsky defended the killing of the Czar & his family but condemned the killing of his sons by Stalin.

The "but" makes it sound as if you find this odd. Stalin was after one man, Trotsky himself, because Trotsky was Stalin's rival, not just for the leadership of the Party, but a representative of a different, Leninist, anti-Stalinist ideology. Killing Trotsky's sons was part and parcel of doing away with Trotsky and this alternative Trotsky's leadership would have ushered.

The Czar and his family, like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in the French revolution, were actual absolute rulers of countries with a vast mass of disenfranchised workers AND the ultimate symbols of oppression. While it may be interesting to speculate whether people like them could have ever undergone such a change of heart as to embrace the revolution (and there are a good many examples of people from the upper classes taking up workers' interests), it seems far more likely--inevitable, in fact-- that they would have remained a perpetual source of reaction, whether of their own volition or mobilised by the royalists. There is also the context of an ongoing civil war, where White and Red Russians were killing each other for at least five years after Russia's withdrawal from the WWI. Whereas Nikolai Romanov could have abdicated at any time during his disastrous reign--and this was something actually proposed to him decades before--by the time the revolution broke out that was too little too late.

I also want to take up the idea that "it's OK when the proletariat kills". By the time the proletariat kills it will have endured generations, sometimes millennia, of oppression. It's impossible to calculate the suffering of the working classes throughout history--those same people who enable the rich scum to live their lives of rich scum. It's impossible to calculate the damage capitalism and its champions are doing right this moment to the vast billions on this planet and the planet itself. Marie Antoinette lost one head, the proles have lost millions. But it's much more effective to show one little rich girl shot dead than thousands or tens of thousands of working class kids being ground by poverty to death at fifteen.

ROMANIA

Bogdan Suceavă, Miruna, A Tale

Suceava is a mathematician by profession (teaching in California) and a writer by avocation. He is originally from a small town in rural Romania and, though I do not know that particular place, I have spent many weeks in rural Romania. Perhaps for that reason, this book resonated with me—though I think it so well done that even readers completely unfamiliar with Romania would be entranced. The story takes place in a village in the Carpathian Mountains. Like much of the Balkans, it is a bastion of orality, a place where modernity has only begun to take hold in the last fifty years or so. The grandfather, aware that he doesn’t have much time left, tells his grandchildren stories that blend family history with local legends with 20th century history. One of those children, now grown, re-tells the tales. The stories are fantastic, impossible, and true, and brilliantly recreate the storytelling traditions of the region. Fairy tale characters mix with real historical figures mix with family members and recreate a world that is on the verge of disappearing forever.