Every Hunter Wants to Know: A Leningrad Life

by Mikhail Iossel

Set against the backdrop of Leningrad, this novel centers around the life of precocious loner Yevgeny Litovtsev

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

244 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1991

About the author

Mikhail Iossel was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia), where he worked as an electromagnetic engineer and belonged to an organization of samizdat writers before immigrating to the United States in 1986.

He is the author of Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling and one previous collection of fiction: Every Hunter Wants to Know.

A frequent contributor to the New Yorker, his stories and essays have also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Ecotone, Guernica, Tikkun, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.

Iossel, a Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner Fellow, has taught in universities throughout the United States and is an associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.

Reviews

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every Hunter Wants to Know was billed as a witty and insightful examination of a life in Soviet Leningrad, but it was neither. It contains interesting stories and family tales, but nothing new, or that has not been said better by others.

[Rachel Swearingen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading /Every Hunter/ on and off for a few weeks, and I find that I am always at home here, despite time away between. The stories take place in Soviet Russia (mostly Leningrad), as well as in Boston and New York, and follow the life of Yevgeny Litovtsev. One senses the presence of a true writer and storyteller here, behind each of these narrators, inviting the reader in, despite, and even because of the possible danger. This is especially true in the title story, "Every Hunter Wants to Know," a truly masterful work. If you can read only one of Iossel's stories, read this one. The opening is fantastic, and the descriptions of Yvegeny's family truly wonderful. I felt like I was there, in the child's body, astounded with the characters around me. The story details a trip into the forest to hunt for mushrooms, but it is about so much more, about the workings of memory, the terrors of childhood, the development of an artist, the pressure writers often feel to present the obvious rather than the mysterious and inexplicable. I find myself thinking about Yvegeny lost in the woods with his two mushrooms, not knowing that his grandmother is close, quite often. This is a story that sticks with you, and harkens the world and the tumultuous history that Yvegeny will eventually venture into. You will smell the mushrooms, hear the whispers in the woods, and wait outside the forest for the return of the lost family dog.

While I love the childhood stories, the final stories in the collection are also wonderful--and strangely terrifying. Iossel describes Yevgeny's sense of dislocation and disorientation after emigrating to Boston so well that I actually felt Yevgeny's nausea as my own. "Insomnia" is a fantastic story, and a perfect story to end the book with as Yevgeny discovers that English is making him ill and that he is strangely no longer himself in a world where he cannot express himself as he could in his native language--the story captures his disorientation and produces a near delirium in the reader. Anyone who has tried to live and work in a new country while trying to learn a new language will recognize this "place," but it's all the more intense here because this story occurs just after Perestroika in Boston and NYC.