La petite gare

by Yuri Kazakov

Une jeune fille aux yeux sombres, en larmes, sur le quai d'une gare battu par le vent froid de l'automne ; deux jeunes pêcheurs, à l'aube, au bord d'une rivière ; un homme qui marche dans la nuit et fait une étrange rencontre...
Découvert par Aragon, l'écrivain Iouri Kazakov donne vie aux gens simples, à la nature généreuse, dans un style limpide et sensible.

372 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Yuri Pavlovich Kazakov was a Russian author of short stories. He started out as a jazz musician, but turned to publishing his stories in 1952. He attended the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, graduating in 1958. Kazakov was born to a worker's family in Moscow and grew up in the old Arbat area, which has today been turned into a tourist attraction but in the mid-1900s was the focal point of Russian culture. He emerged as a writer only thanks to the short period in recent Russian history known as "the Thaw", but in the mid-1960s, this period gave way to stagnation in culture and public life. Kazakov produced some of his best stories in the 1970s, which dealt with the merging of two souls, the soul of the newborn and the soul of the poet at the end of his life.

Kazakov died on November 29, 1982 and was buried in Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow.

Reviews

[Seingalt]

It's unlikely I'd have picked up and read this short book of three stories had it been written in English or some other language I already know. I picked it up, in fact, almost exclusively because I'm learning Russian, and there aren't too many dual-language books with Russian as one of the language pairs. This book by Kazakov was one of them.

And I'm glad I read it. Not just because it helped me improve my Russian but also because I enjoyed it in its own right. I often had to force myself to pick the book up and start reading, but that was always because of my struggles with the Russian language, never because I was annoyed by the author or his stories.

Speaking of the three stories, they are outwardly simple affairs that take place in the countryside. The title story, "На полустанке" ("La petite gare" in the French translation), was the shortest, whereas "Ночь" ("Nocturne"), an account of a nighttime walk in the woods, was the longest, and probably my favorite. The middle story, "Тихое утро" ("Une matinée tranquille"), was also enjoyable. A near-drowning made it more eventful than the two other stories but also slightly less appealing: the stories I like best are the ones that captivate me while also being uneventful.

I liked these stories for some of the same reasons I like stories by Hemingway and Mario Rigoni Stern.