Маша Регина

Книжная полка Вадима Левенталя

by Vadim Levental, Вадим Левенталь

Masha dreams of becoming one of the great European auteurs. But first she must escape the drudgery of her daily existence: a father who drinks, a dull and empty city, the fear of getting stuck in a life she doesn’t want. So as soon as she is old enough she heads to the big city to claim her spot alongside the great filmmakers of the day. But she is unprepared for the sacrifices she must make to succeed. Lovers come and go – the college teacher, the cameraman, the renowned German actor – but Masha must decide whether she is prepared to forsake her happiness for her art: how far is she willing to go?

Part philosophical treatise, part bildungsroman, Masha Regina is at once disturbing, intellectually challenging and unfailingly entertaining, and marks the arrival of an exciting new voice in Russian and international literature.

Genres: Russia, Fiction, Russian Literature

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Vadim Levental was born in St. Petersburg and studied Russian literature at St. Petersburg State University. He has worked as a loader, a waiter, a designer, a bank clerk and played a small part in a TV series. He is now the managing director of the National Bestseller Prize and editor-in-chief of an independent press in St. Petersburg. His fiction has been published in numerous international magazines and, including "St. Petersburg Noir" (Akashic Books, Brooklyn, NY). "Masha Regina" is his first novel. He lives in St. Petersburg. Translator Lisa Hayden lives in Maine.

See Вадим Левенталь

Reviews

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This extraordinary novel takes absolute attention and a willingness to read slowly. It demands much from the reader. It wasn't a natural read for me because I'm typically the kind of reader who is in the middle of many novels at once, and I like to read quickly. So the novel stretched me and made me confront my own weaknesses as a reader, mostly for the good.

Some parts of the novel felt digressive. Some passages are written in a way where I felt far removed from the action, where the reading experience reminded me of how I feel when reading Gibbon vs. how I usually feel while reading a modern novel. This isn't just a fancy way of saying I was bored--rather I would say that I was aware of when I was working at reading, vs. just reading. And then something would happen in the novel that gripped me absolutely--something that made me laugh, or made me nod in recognition, or made me delight in the language itself.

If the word "erudite" doesn't sound like a criticism, you are likely to enjoy reading this novel. If you want to be challenged rather than entertained, you are likely to love this novel. There is much here to entertain, to be sure, but the experience of reading Masha Regina was more like engaging in an at times serious, at times rambling dialog with the author, rather than sitting back to listen to the author tell me the story.

[Ginni · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tried so hard (to get through this book) and got so far (over half-way), but in the end, it doesn't even matter (because from my skimming of the rest of it, it was just more of the same).

Masha Regina was obviously a labor of love. Every character, every word, seems to have been meticulously and painstakingly molded (this comes through even in the translation). But I kept waiting for a plot to pop up somewhere, and it just...never did. Masha leaves home, goes to school, ends up becoming a filmmaker, and gets involved with multiple guys. It's all told in a detached narrative with low emotional stakes and it's all very ~artsy~ but I couldn't make myself care. Maybe the defect is with me and not the book.

(I received this book for free through a Goodreads giveaway.)

[Katia N · Rating 2 out of 5]

С самого начала я более-менее себе представляла, чем это все закончится. И не потому, что я такая догадливая, а потому что автор от своего имени и от имени главной героини не устает повторять, чтобы ты не делал(ла) и чего бы ты не достиг(ла), все равно это закончится одним и тем же. И ты ничего не можешь изменить. Сентенции типа: "Именно тогда Маша поняла, что настоящая бездна открывается не там, где ты понимаешь, а там где ты обнаруживаешь, что в твоем понимании нет никакого смысла. Я знаю, что будет, но я ничего не могу, - Маша не смогла бы сказать, откуда у нее в голове всплыла эта строчка", попадаются довольно часто и скоро начинают надоедать.

Откуда такая обреченность, неизбежность и фатализм? И неужели нет ничего светлого вообще, особенно, если ты одарен, как главная героиня. Или в этом светлом нет смысла?

Все умозаключения этого произведения весьма умозрительны, да и только. Они могут импонировать только очень молодым людям, ну лет так до 25. В том возрасте кажется, что ты уже много прожил, все знаешь и можешь сформулировать универсальные печальные законы бытия легко и просто с кружкой пива в руке.

Книга ничего не сделала, чтобы развеять стереотип о русских мужчинах (мальчиках, как чаще всего называет их автор). Они в большинстве своем пьяницы, слабаки и трусы, предпочитающие ничего не решать в своей жизни, а находиться у женщин под каблуком. Неужели это правда? Ссылки на Евгения Онегина как-то не чувствуются уместными. В Пушкине много легкости и света. Здесь этого нет совсем.

Еще откуда такая привязанность автора к повторению однотипных вводных конструкций: "А дело было так:" Или это уже в честь русских народных сказок? Меня лично это только утомляло.

Английские слова, написанные русскими буквами очень режут слух. Хорошо, что их не очень много. Но "леп-топ" или "мессидж" - неприятно просто! Ну ладно не хочется использовать раннее руссифицированные слова типа "компьютер". Но дефис-то зачем? Про "мессидж" мне даже сказать нечего.

Единственным светлым пятном для меня были зарисовки Питера, которых, к счастью, достаточно много. Через них просвечивает любовь автора и героини к этому прекрасному и мистическому городу. И в это я готова поверить и полностью разделить.

2.5 stars

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the January 2017 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...

[Jessica (Odd and Bookish) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book for free through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers.

So this was an interesting book. I'm not sure that I "got" it, however, it was really well written and translated. The style is different than what I typically read and I liked that. It made the book unique, which is why I gave it 4 stars instead of 3. That extra star was for being original and fresh. Overall, this is an innovative piece of Russian literature.

[Trine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Мне не понравилось, ничем абсолютно не зацепило.

[Sophie · Rating 1 out of 5]

No plot, a psychopathic protagonist and so much unnecessary fourth wall break - definitely fancies itself as an 'artsy deep book' but it was just unnecessarily complex to read. I picked it up in every spare moment not because I was eager to read it, but because I was eager to finish it and read something else. Glad it was only 50p

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5*

[Gabby M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Translating Vadim Levental's Masha Regina must have been an especially delicate endeavor, so props to Lisa Hayden. Levental spent five years writing the book and it's obvious that he chose each word carefully. Hayden's translation is lush and evocative...obviously I can't read it in the original Russian, but it's hard to believe that it suffered any real loss being taken into English. Masha Regina is the story of the titular woman (her given name is actually Maria, but she's almost exclusively referred to by her nickname during the course of the novel), from about the time she's a teenager to well into her adulthood. It's hard to tell how old she's supposed to be by the end, exactly, because the novel progresses in a loosely linear way but with lots of digressions backwards and forwards and it can be hard to tell at any given moment where we are in Masha's life. It works when you're reading it, as long as you're paying attention, but it makes it hard to summarize the novel in a straightfoward way.

I do love a good summary, though, so I'll take a crack at it. Masha is an artistically gifted teenager living in a small, decaying town in the Russian countryside. She doesn't necessarily know what she wants, but she knows she doesn't want to get stuck there like her parents, and when she's probably about 15 she manages to get her parents to send her to St. Petersburg to go to boarding school. On the train to the city, she meets Roma, another teenager who's heading back to his own studies in the city. He helps her get to her school and she falls a little bit in love with him, which she continues to be even as she has a long-term relationship with one of her teachers and he rejects her when she comes to see him. It's only later in their lives, after they've graduated and begun working towards careers in filmmaking (she as a director, he as a cinematographer) that they finally get together and become romantically as well as professionally involved. Their relationship is tempestuous, and Masha becomes pregnant with their child shortly before she leaves him for good, taking up with an older German actor while he romances a former school friend of hers.

Although it's Masha's story and she's a fascinating character to spend a couple hundred pages with, it's never quite clear what drives her. At the beginning it's a desire to escape the drudgery she's surrounded with, which she does both through art and eventual literal escape. And then it's a desire to stay escaped, working her way to catch up with school so she can stay in St. Petersburg, building a name for herself as a director. But once she's got a solid career, her artistic expression seems almost more like a compulsion than a drive or a passion. The cool shell she built herself to keep her propelling through her early life eventually traps her...she doesn't know how to deal with adversity besides creating a film and throwing herself into the making of it.

As I read, I found myself mostly focusing on the way fate seems to play a role in the construction of a life...Masha's life particularly, but all our lives, really. Masha's chance connection on the train with Roma as a teenager reverberates through her entire life. She gets into directing after accompanying a friend to an audition for an acting graduate program. The big things matter, of course, but the little coincidences of our lives can be even more meaningful, in the end. Masha Regina is beautifully written (maybe a little overwritten) and mostly pretty compelling, but the sum of its parts is more than the whole, somehow.

[Michael O'Donnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

In English this was a difficult read.

The time jump, backwards and forwards, through the narrative, fractured the Storyline. The nesting of sentences is so deep that they are virtually unreadable. You have to read a few, a few times.

The story was excellent. It invokes a world that is an art scene in Eastern European. Tragedy. Rage. Despondency. Melancholy and more Rage. Beautiful scenes.

It was frustrating. It was a ride.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Le début m'a fasciné par sa poésie, mais la suite à laisser place à une profonde tristesse. C'est assez subjectif mais j'ai été attristé par cette fin, par la façon dont tout lui est arraché sans vergogne et sans gêne...
Il est difficile de qualifier cette histoire de belle, ou de ironiquement réel. Mais plutôt d'un spleen du XXIème siècle...

[Syroezhka · Rating 3 out of 5]

The protagonist is passionately driven but often she does not know what she is driven by. Interesting take on creativity

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won this book on goodreads.com !
Wonderfully complex and compelling.
READ IT!

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

A challenging story .. but well worth diving into. The story of Masha lurches back and forth .. careening into dark areas then back to light. Best read in big doses. A great tale! The author has provided much more than just a first novel.

[Verona · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love this book! I read it a few years ago, but I'm still deeply under its impression and often find myself thinking of its plot... I guess I can relate to the main character to some degree. Perhaps that's why it was easy for me to understand, accept, and appreciate...Also, I read it in its original language, and I enjoyed the authors writing style a lot.

[Susannah]

abandoned.