Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "russian"

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future (trans. from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull)

This book written in the 1920s in Russia by a man who couldn’t publish because what he wrote couldn’t satisfy the “realist” taste of the Communist authorities is not an easy read, but it has some extraordinary pages. Some American reviewers call him “surrealist” because the reality he describes doesn’t correspond to their definition of reality. What would people do if the word “surrealist” didn’t exist? This has nothing to do with surrealism. Maybe the Soviet reality of the time was surreal, but poor Sigizmund had no intention of being “surrealist”! Let’s remember that the surrealists were either being playful or were trying to subvert the “rational” way of looking at things. But Russian and East European writers don’t need to “subvert” this rational way of perceiving the real because they don’t perceive it in this rational way to being with. They are naturally “irrational” (that is, according to the Western definition of “reason”)—ie, they do not necessarily use a cause-effect logic.

SK was a kin soul to Felipe Alfau. His characters not only become independent of their creator, but turn into critics, denying their author’s existence—“they are the book’s atheists.”

In one of the book’s dialogues, one of the characters asks, “What distinguishes a creator of culture from its consumers?”

The answer is the best definition of the artist I have ever read:

“Honesty”—and this is why:

What distinguishes them is the fact that, unlike other people, the creator gives back what he receives on credit from nature. Every day the sun “lends its rays to every one of us.” To give something back is a duty of anyone who “doesn’t wish to be a thief of his own existence. Talent is just that, a basic honesty on the part of ‘I’ toward ‘not I’, a partial payment of the bill presented by the sun: the painter pays for the colors of things with the paints on his palette […:] the philosopher pays for the world with his worldview.”

In other words: Honesty toward a higher order of things (not toward your next-door neighbor)

2017 by Olga Slavnikova
Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz
Overlook Press, 2010

2017 was published in 2010 by Overlook Press, one of the contemporary American presses dedicated to publishing quality literary fiction, and particularly fiction in translation. This novel, which was awarded the Russian Booker Prize a few years ago, has gone virtually unnoticed in this country. This overlook—no pun intended—is hard to explain, especially since the translation was done by an accomplished translator, Marian Schwartz. True, the editorial job leaves to be desired, but considering that the author has a tendency toward complicated sentences with many subordinates, and a very complex vocabulary (let’s mention only the vocabulary having to do with rock hounding), the English version is impressive. Some people may not like the author’s exaggerated penchant for comparisons and metaphors, and I myself think that in places the novel is “overwritten,” but there are also numerous instances in which one is simply carried away by its beauty.

One of the ways one can tell a great work of art from merely a good work is the perfect coherence between “form” and “content.” In such cases, the style’s beauty isn’t simply a beautiful envelope for a more or less interesting “story:” the style is a continuation and a representation of the content itself. 2017 is a perfect example of this: the novel, focused on gem hunters and precious stones, seems to radiate a transparent beauty one usually associates with the mineral world (transparency is, by the way, one of its major themes).

For the readers who get impatient with descriptions—even very beautiful ones—the first…hmm…hundred pages might be too slow. But then, the pace changes, and contemporary Russia with its multicolored universe of nouveaux riches, crooks, poor babushkas, politicians that seem a cross between a cheap crook and Dr. Evil, vulgar divas, sophisticated divas with the charisma of a TV star and the intuition of a prophet, becomes the background of a quest whose hero somehow manages to keep a certain purity in spite of all the odds. The hero is coveted by two women, who, apparently, couldn’t be more different: Tanya (whose real name he doesn’t even know, and with whom he has an unusual love affair) and Tamara (his former wife, gorgeous, still in love with him, and immensely rich).

But the true character is here 21st century Russia, a country in which, like everywhere else in a world dominated by new technologies, there are two parallel worlds: the one of the virtual, or, in Baudrillard’s terminology, of the copy—a world in which people play roles, and the costumes they wear dictate what they feel and do; and the one of the authentic—a world made of poor people, who can’t play any other role save for what they are and have always been. In 2017, a hundred years after the Russian revolution, these worlds clash, and a new revolution begins. A fascinating novel.

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.

On April 4th the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco presented a discussion moderated by Scott Esposito with the Russian writer Mikhail Shishkin, and his American translator, Marian Schwartz. Shishkin, who is considered one of the major contemporary writers (and not only in Russia), is a charming, intelligent interlocutor. He now lives in Switzerland, where he worked for several years as an interpreter. It is very important for a writer, Shishkin said, to live abroad because otherwise it’s like living in a house without mirrors. Then, he added that if he could, he would make it obligatory for everybody to live abroad for several years. In other words: one needs to live abroad in order to see himself and his compatriots with the eyes of another. Since in the case of a writer, the experience of physical dislocation becomes entangled with that of linguistic estrangement, this experience has made Shishkin “understand that to write means to create language.” “A writer resurrects dead words,” Shishkin said. The words that we normally take for granted are, as it were, dead, and it’s only when we move away from them—and what better way of moving away than living abroad, in a foreign language?—that we can give them back their freshness.

The discussion continued with a more political topic: Shishkin has recently made public his decision not to represent Russia at this year’s BEA in New York (where Russia is a guest) because he doesn’t want to “be the human face of Putin’s regime.” His decision has created, apparently, a big controversy in Russia. Shishkin ended his comments with a revealing point about Russian culture, in which there has always been a dichotomy between the Tsar and the Poet: “The Poet always wins!”

I bought a copy of his 506-page novel, Maidenhair. As I write this, I am at page 258, and I can honestly say I may not finish it. Let me make this clear: this is a very good novel, and as far as I can tell, the translation does it justice. But it is also a very complex and complicated novel (poor Scott Esposito stated a few times during their discussion that the novel was difficult, and the author interrupted him abruptly with a, “No, it is not difficult!”) and it demands a lot of patience. The novel moves between interviews with Russian and former Soviet citizens who are trying to get political asylum in Switzerland, and the diary of a Russian singer from early 20th century, whose biography the interpreter once considered writing (as Shishkin, the protagonist is an interpreter of Russian origin). Also, in between, we have scenes from the interpreter’s personal life (narrated to a mysterious “Nebuchadnezzasaurus”—a very puzzling character until a minute ago when I read the back cover and discovered that he is the interpreter’s son!). What complicates all these intermingled stories is that the present is sometimes written from the perspective of the past, that is, various characters from the present are presented are characters in a Persian war, so in the end, it’s hard to tell who’s who. But this should not deter you from reading (and finishing) this amazing novel. I have two huge piles of books I have to read in the next few months, and alas, only one life.

According to the publisher, Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s novel, Daniel Stein Interpreter (published in the original in 2006), is “seen by many as the great Russian novel of our time.” Such a generous description may enlarge the number of readers, but it also runs the risk of raising the expectations too high. Personally, I might have enjoyed the novel more if I hadn’t read it with the constant hope that some great revelation will occur at some point (it didn’t).

My feelings about the novel have remained ambivalent from the beginning to the end. On the one hand, I admired the writer’s ambitious project, as she built a mosaic made of dozens of fragments (i.e., all the characters, each bringing his/her own perspective and story to the Greater Story of Israel). Structurally, the novel is very interesting and daring: written without a unifying “I,” it is a polyphonic novel made of multiple voices, and, although there is a voice that is stronger than the others—that of Brother Daniel, based on a real person—in the end, all the voices mingle to create a unique, hymn-like tapestry. Even the author appears with her own name at the end of each part—the novel has five parts—in a letter that addresses both her personal situation at that particular moment and her difficulties in putting together the novel. Indeed, most of the novel is made of letters written by different characters, or (tape) recordings of conversations between them, or speeches made by Brother Daniel on various occasions, in which he narrates his incredible life as a Polish Jew who worked as an interpreter for both the Gestapo and the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), trying in the process to save as many lives as possible, and who, eventually, converted to Catholicism and moved to Israel.

But a novel with as many voices as this one is not easy to write, and this is where the writer comes short. Many of the voices sound the same, and some, in particular the American characters, are quite implausible. When Alex, an American teenager, informs his mother in writing that he is gay, and uses words like “bound by such vital passion,” the implausibility reaches such peaks that it’s almost comical. Some negative reviews of the novel have mentioned its “flat tone,” but I would rather describe the tone as restrained, and the style as paralleling in its asceticism Brother Daniel’s monastic life. There is a certain serenity that comes off the page, and this is no doubt because the simplicity of the style matches the content of the descriptions. And then, there are the numerous, long paragraphs in which various characters reflect on Judaism and Christianity, which I found intelligent and informative, but others might find tedious. All in all, this is an impressive historical document (indeed, not only Brother Daniel, but other characters have existed, or still do, in real life), but I am not sure it is a very successful novel. The main problem stems from its very premise: Brother Daniel is conceived as a model of humanity, and the entire novel, starting with the author’s foreword, reinforces this idea, as well as its corollary, the necessity of tolerance and understanding between people. I’m all for tolerance and understanding, but I don’t know of any great work of literature based on such an unambiguous, let’s-all-hold-hands kind of message. Ambiguity is (at) the heart of literature, and it is not an accident that the novel’s most vivid character is the least “positive” or “inspiring:” Rita Kowacz, the inflexible Communist and bad mother, who became a Protestant before dying.

1. The Art of Joy by Goliarda Sapienza (2013, Italian)
2. The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante (2005, Italian)
3. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante (2014, Italian)
4. The Bridge over the Neroch by Leonid Tsypkin (2012, Russian)
5. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka (2006, British)
6. Christopher and Columbus by Elizabeth von Arnim (1995, 1919, British)
7. Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott (2003, 1984, American)
8. Kinder than Solitude by Yiyun Li (2014, American-Chinese)
9. Slow Homecoming by Peter Handke (2009, Austrian)
10. The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tampinar (2014, Turkish)