Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

by Mikhail Shishkin, Marian Schwartz (Translator), Leo Shtutin (Translator)

The first English-language collection of short stories by Russia's greatest contemporary author, Mikhail Shishkin, the only author to win all three of Russia's most prestigious literary awards.

Often included in discussions of Nobel Prize contenders, Shishkin is a master prose writer in the breathtakingly beautiful style of the greatest Russian authors, known for complex, allusive novels about universal and emotional themes. Shishkin's stories read like modern versions of the eternal literature written by his greatest inspirations: Boris Pasternak, Ivan Bunin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Bulgakov.

Shishkin's short fiction is the perfect introduction to his breathtaking oeuvre, his stories touch on the same big themes as his novels, spanning discussions of love and loss, death and eternal life, emigration and exile.

Calligraphy Lesson spans Shishkin's entire writing career, including his first published story, the 1993 Debut Prize–winning "Calligraphy Lesson," and his most recent story "Nabokov's Inkblot," which was written for a dramatic adaptation performed in Zurich in 2013.

Mikhail Shishkin (b. 1961 in Moscow) is one of the most prominent names in contemporary Russian literature. A former interpreter for refugees in Switzerland, Shishkin divides his time between Moscow, Switzerland, and Germany.

Genres: Short Stories, Russia, Fiction, Russian Literature, Contemporary, Literature, Essays

180 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Mikhail Pavlovich Shishkin (Russian: Михаил Павлович Шишкин, born 18 January 1961) is a Russian writer.
Mikhail Shishkin was born in 1961 in Moscow.
Shishkin studied English and German at Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. After graduation he worked as a street sweeper, road worker, journalist, school teacher, and translator. He debuted as a writer in 1993, when his short story "Calligraphy Lesson" was published in Znamya magazine. Since 1995 he has lived in Zurich, Switzerland. He averages one book every five years.
Shishkin openly opposes the current Russian government, calling it a "corrupt, criminal regime, where the state is a pyramid of thieves" when he pulled out of representing Russia at the 2013 Book Expo in the United States.
Shishkin's books have been translated into more than ten languages. His prose is universally praised for style, e.g., "Shishkin's language is wonderfully lucid and concise. Without sounding archaic, it reaches over the heads of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (whose relationship with the Russian language was often uneasy) to the tradition of Pushkin." He deals with universal themes like death, resurrection, and love. Shishkin has been compared to numerous great writers, including Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, while he admits to being influenced by Chekhov along with Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Bunin, saying "Bunin taught me not to compromise, and to go on believing in myself. Chekhov passed on his sense of humanity – that there can’t be any wholly negative characters in your text. And from Tolstoy I learned not to be afraid of being naïve."

Reviews

[Vicky "phenkos" · Rating 4 out of 5]

When my GR friend Berengaria di Rossi invited me to take part in the Language Learners and Polyglots group, I found it an excellent opportunity to brush up my rusty Russian. After some thought, I settled on the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Poetry offers a rare window into the idiosyncracies of a language, and although it can be notoriously difficult to translate, it can be easier to read than a novel or collection of short stories due to its brevity and its deceptive simplicity. In addition, Mayakovsky has always been an enigmatic figure for me; his passion for creating new poetic forms, his association with the Futurist movement and his revolutionary zeal have always singled him out as a unique individual. Needless to say, there are many exceptional and era-defining works written in Russian, but as an old Professor of mine used to say 'You don't want to plough through the Karamazov Brothers in the original!' No, indeed!

The eruption of the war on Ukraine put an end to my plans, though. I felt quite strongly that I couldn't go on as if nothing had happened and even considered dropping my commitment altogether unless a more suitable object of study was found. As I was reading The Guardian earlier today, however, the perfect candidate turned up as if by magic! Mikhail Shishkin, a Russian writer living in Switzerland, someone with intimate knowledge of the Russian language and the Russian people, and with strong views about the current state of affairs. The story I focused on for the purposes of my Language Learning and Polyglot group was 'Nabokov's Inkblot' or Клякса Набокова, a рассказ included in Calligraphy Lesson but also available online in Russian here and in English translation in New England Review (Vol. 34, Issue 3-4)
https://www.nereview.com/mikhail-shis...
I loved 'Nabokov's Inkblot'! The story starts with a skint Russian émigré -the narrator- who makes a meagre living by working odd jobs here and there. His wife's and son's birthdays are coming up shortly and the poor narrator stretches himself to find a bit of cash to buy them presents. He therefore accepts the job of an interpreter to Kovalev, a Russian billionnaire visiting Switzerland for a few days. As he sets eyes on Kovalev at the airport, he immediately recognises an old acquaintance from the Moscow Institute where both men had studied. But the Russian billionnaire does not recognise him in return.

Over the next few days, the narrator shows Kovalev and his family around Zurich. Not that an interpreter was really necessary as Kovalev proves himself a fluent speaker of English. Rather the narrator's role is to assent to everything Kovalev says, a kind of 'lackey' as the narrator painfully reminds himself every now and again. But we also learn a few interesting things about Kovalev; for example, that he was a Komsomol official who relished giving speeches and conveying the party line back in the day. The narrator, by contrast, despised Kovalev and everything he stood for. Yet, despite the political upheaval and collapse of the Soviet Union, not much has changed.

А теперь была совсем другая жизнь, но Ковалев и в ней оказался наверху. А я внизу.

Life was completely different now, but Kovalev still ended up on top. And I ended up on the bottom.

We get the impression that the narrator envies Kovalev or he he feels resentment for his lot, and indeed there is such an element in the story. However, there is much more than that. This is highlighted by the role of Nabokov in the story. At some point, Kovalev and his family decide to visit the hotel Nabokov stayed at when he lived in Switzerland. In fact, they decide to stay at the same room as Nabokov. 'Nabokov is a genius', Kovalev exclaims to our bemused narrator, who has a great admiration for Nabokov but cannot quite square his own admiration with Kovalev's, given Kovalev's past role in toeing the party line.

But still, it was strange. When we were young, Nabokov was banned. You had to copy him out by hand, type him out on the typewriter. We passed him along secretly to one another and thought of ourselves as a persecuted sect, his books our treasured riches. No, maybe we felt like a battalion at war--because there was a war on, a war of the system against our minds and souls. And Nabokov was more than a writer; he was our weapon. Reading was more than a way to pass the time out of boredom, but a fight, a defense. We didn't want to be slaves and defended the only morsel of freedom in that life--our heads. Nabokov was our symbol in those years. Nabokov marked the dividing line between Us and Them. Kovalev was definitely a part of Them. And now he was driving me to Montreux. Everything was so strange ...

Kovalev's enthusiasm for Nabokov is short-lived. He finds the room small and stuffy and requests a bigger and more airy room. The narrator's awe, by contrast, is moving. Upon finding Nabokov's inkblot in a drawer at the desk where the geat master used to sit and write, the narrator experiences a rare sense of elation. To have touched Nabokov's inkblot - what an experience!

I am not going to give away the story's ending. Suffice it to say that it is bittersweet: it does not right the wrongs the story highlights but it does serve as a reminder that Russia's billionnaries are not immune to having bad things happen to them. For language learners interested in practising their Russian, this is quite suitable assuming you're roughly at intermediate level and above - the difficulty would be with vocabulary as sentence construction and dialogue are for the most part straightforward. I made a start on the translation and got so carried away that I finished the story in English before I even looked at the Russian, but it should be ok if you decide to start with the Russian text.

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoughtful, inventive collection of short fiction, essays and assorted bits of creative ‘life writing’ from a writer who, it seems, has been lauded with just about every literary prize going in Russia and is now finally being made available in English. The pieces collected here use translations from four different translators, allowing you to triangulate in on his prose style quite well – and it's important to get a feel for it because Shishkin, who lives in Zurich, is often talked of as uniting a traditional Russian sensibility of literature with a more Western focus on formal experimentation and wordplay. Expect shifting narrators and multiple borrowed voices – a confusion that may be exacerbated by all the references to Russian literature that you can admire as they go sailing over your head.

In ‘The Blind Musician’, the blurring of character and perspective forces the reader to accept a formal counterpoint to the blindness of one of its main subjects. That, or he's just fucking with you. With the title story – which launched Shishkin on to the literary scene in 1993 – a translator's note attempts to clear up some of the confusion, though those of you who have a greater familiarity with Russian lit than I do (everyone, in other words) may be less in the dark. I found this story less successful, although the central descriptive tour-de-force, about how to write the word невтерпёж (‘fed up’), showed such a love for the sensuality of writing that I was quite won over.

Much more to my taste, though, were the more apparently non-fictional efforts, which ruminate calmly but broodingly on the experience of being a Russian in exile (not actual political exile – just a Russian living abroad, really) and take in a bizarre constellation of reference points that include Robert Walser, Nabokov, Joyce, Chekhov, and the Swiss-German nursery rhyme Schlaf, Chindli, schlaf. ‘The Bell Tower of San Marco’, an essay of pure archival research, left me, to my surprise, drained and on the point of tears on the train, though flicking back through it afterwards I couldn't work out how his simple presentation had spun the story with such emotional lethality.

Recurring again and again is the notion, the theory, the practice, of language. A jobbing translator/interpreter, Shishkin had lots of time and reason to think about how concepts shift and change when they are transposed, however carefully, into new tongues: having experienced something similar myself on a much smaller scale, it was fascinating to see him write about how his novel, begun in Russia, made no sense when worked on in Switzerland. ‘The letters I'd traced out there had a totally different density here. The novel ended up being about something else.’ Here is a writer of whom reading him in translation can truly be said to amplify his themes. And, just occasionally, he'll leave you speechless with delight:

Language has a grammatical past and future but no past or future. In the dimension of words, time twists like a screw with a stripped thread. Time can be opened at any line. Open the first line a hundred times, and you will force Him to create heaven and earth a hundred times and race over the water. He is racing right now.

[Shaghayegh · Rating 4 out of 5]

تو دوران تحصیل، اساتیدی سر راهت قرار می‌گیرن که فقط درس رو بهت یاد نمیدن. اون درس بهونه‌ای میشه تا رگه‌هایی از زندگی هم میون تدریسشون انتقال بدن. تجاربی که چشیدن، تکه‌هایی از زندگی بی‌رحمانه‌ای که می‌گذرونن و تعاملی که در نهایت شاید از خود درس ارزشمندتر تلقی شه.
یوگنی آلکساندرویچ به درس خوشنویسی می‌پردازه اما شغلش در سیستم عدالت کیفری می‌گنجه. مردی که با پرونده‌های غمناک و مهلکی طرفه و چه پناهگاهی می‌تونه برای رهایی از بار سنگین جرم و جنایات روزانه‌ی آدم‌های معمولی پیدا کنه؟ تدریس خوشنویسی یه راه‌حل کم‌نظیر به نظر می‌رسه، طوری که در وصف نوشتن حتی یه کلمه میگه:

امتحان کنید، فقط یک لغت را طوری بنویسید که جلوه‌ی نظم و هماهنگی باشد، تا فقط با زیبایی و سلامتش تمام این دنیای وحشی، تمام این غارنشینی را به تعادل و توازن برساند.

کلاس درسش از زنانی تشکیل شده که اسامیشون در واقع ارجاعات ادبی به شمار میان. در مقدمه‌ی نسخه‌ی انگلیسی، به دو نکته‌ی کلیدی برای درک این اثر کوتاه اشاره شده:

The reader will want to be aware of two issues in particular.
First, what the English reader may not realize—but the Russian will pick up instantly—is that the various women’s names refer to characters from Russian classics: Sofia Pavlovna from Griboedov’s play Woe from Wit;  Tatiana Dmitrievna from Pushkin’s long poem Evgeny Onegin;  Nastasia Filippovna from Dostoevsky’s Idiot;  Anna Arkadievna from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina;  and Larochka (Lara) from Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.
Second, the passage describing the calligraphy of a specific Russian word—невтерпеж—posed what was for me an unprecedented dilemma arising from the fact that in it Shishkin describes each letter as an object, yet the word’s lexical meaning remains important.

«درس خوشنویسی» بازتاب تجربه‌ای که از طریق عمل نوشتن هدایت میشه و بهش می‌پردازه. کورسوی امید و روزنه‌ای به حساب میاد که بتونی لحظاتی نفس عمیق بکشی و اضطراب و وحشت ویران‌کننده رو با رها کردن قلمت به سبکبالی‌ای تبدیل کنی تا شونه‌هات از فشار روزگار خمیده نشن. چارچوبی که سرشار از صحنه‌هایی از زندگی معاصر روسیه با حال و هوای کلاسیک‌ها فراهم می‌کنه که از طریق مکالمه پیش میره. برای همین باید دقت به خرج بدی چون مکالمه‌محوره و شخصیت‌ها متعددن. علائم نگارشی‌ای هم وجود نداره تا متوجه تغییر راوی‌های متعدد بشی و با ضمایر و خطاب کردن‌ها می‌تونی پی ببری.
یوگنی در میون توضیحات مرتبط، به روزمرگی‌ها و خاطراتش اشاره می‌کنه. جو کلاس از لطافت پیچ و خم قلم، به زمختی‌ای می‌رسه که ناشی از جو زمانه‌ست. همون روسیه‌ای که خود نویسنده ازش دل کند تا شاهد نظام فاسدش نباشه.

تجربه‌ی خوشایندی از قلم نویسنده‌ای بود که تا قبل سراغش نرفته بودم. فکر می‌کنم که با دوباره‌خوانی و درک ارجاعات ادبی به کار رفته، بهتر فهمیده شه.

[Pawarut Jongsirirag · Rating 5 out of 5]

ในที่สุด บ้านเราก็นำงานรัสเซียร่วมสมัยมาตีพิมพ์ให้นักอ่านได้ยลโฉมบ้าง หลังจากวนเวียนกันอยู่เเค่งานในยุคคลาสสิค จนบางทีนึกว่าหลังจากยุคนั้น รัสเซียก็ขาดไร้นักเขียนมือฉมัง ซึ่งเล่มเล็กๆเล่มนี้บอกเราว่า ไม่ใช่นะ นักเขียนร่วมสมัยของรัสเซีย ก็ยังคงคุณภาพคับหิมะอันหนาวเหน็บเเน่นอน

ชื่อของ มิ���าอิล ชิชกิน น่าจะเป็นชื่อที่ไม่เคยได้ยินเลยในสารบบหนังสือบ้านเรา ผมจำได้ลางๆว่าน่าจะเคยมีการนำเรื่องสั้นของชิชกินมาเเปลอยู่เรื่องนึงเมื่อนานมาเเล้ว ซึ่งก็เงียบกริบ ไร้กระเเสหรือการพูดถึงใดๆ จนมาถึงวันนี้ที่กำมะหยี่เอางานของชิชกินสองเล่มมาตีพิมพ์ ซึ่ง 1 ในนั้นคือ เล่มนี้ครับ

บทเรียนเขียนอักษร เป็นเล่มบางๆที่ สนพ เกริ่นไว้ว่าเป็นเล่มที่จะนำผู้อ่านให้ได้รู้จักงานเขียนของชิชกิน มันเลยบรรจุทั้งความเรียง ความเรียงเเนวบันทึก เเละ เรื่องสั้น เราจึงจะได้เห็นลีลาการเขียนของเขาทั้งรูปเเบบนิยายเเละความเรียง

เรื่องเเรก เสื้อคลุมสายคาดท่อนเดียว เป็นความเรียงเเนวบันทึกหลังจากเเม่ของชิชกินเสียชีวิต ตีเเผ่ความไม่ลงรอยกันของทั้งสองเเละการกลับไปทบทวนสิ่งที่เคยมีเเละขาดหายไปที่ชิชกินกับเเม่ของเขาเคยมีร่วมกัน
งานชิ้นนี้เรียบง่าย ตรงไปตรงมาเเละเป็นงานที่อ่านโดยไม่รู้ชื่อคนเขียนก็พอเดาได้เลยว่าเป็นงานของรัสเซียเเน่นอน เพราะเอกลักษณ์ด้านความรวดร้าวนี่ชัดเจนมาก เป็นความเศร้าที่ไม่ใช่ฟูมฟาย เเต่เป็นความเศร้าที่ไม่มีน้ำตา

เรื่องที่สอง บทเรียนเขียนอักษร เป็นเรื่องสั้นเเนวกึ่งกระเเสสำนึก หรือจริงๆอาจเป็นกระเเสสำนึกเลยก็ได้ เเค่ผมคิดว่ามันยังไม่ค่อยเป็นกระแสที่หลั่งไหลขนาดจะเรียนว่าเป็นงานเเบบนั้น
เรื่องนี้อ่านทำความเข้าใจบทสนทนาไม่ยากเย็นนัก เเต่การตีความสารในเรื่องช่างยากเย็นเหลือเกิน การเปรียบเทียบชีวิตกับการเขียนตัวอักษร ผมไม่ค่อยเห็นการเปรียบเทียบเเบบนี้เท่าไหร่ เลยรู้สึกเเปลกใหม่ดีเเละตีความไม่ออกเลยครับว่าเป็นยังไง 555

เรื่องที่สาม นักดนตรีตาบอด เป็นเรื่องสั้นอีกเรื่องที่ชัดเจนในเเนวทางกระแสสำนึก ชิชกินสาดกำเเพงอักษรเเละการสลับผูเพูดไปมาเเบบไม่ให้นักอ่านตั้งตัว เราจะรู้สึกงงไปตลอดเลยว่า อันนี้ใครพูด พูดถึงใครเเละพูดกับใคร เป็นเรื่องเล่าถึงความสัมพันธ์ของ ญ เเละ ช ครอบครัวของทั้งสอง ที่อิรุงตุงนัง เเละคงโทนความโศกเศร้าเเบบไร้นำตาตามสไตล์รัสเซียเช่นเคย เรื่องนี้ต้องใช้สมาธิอ่านสูงมาก ผมเเนะนำว่าอย่าไปโฟกัสเส้นเรื่องมากนัก ปล่อยให้เรื่องราวไหลไป จะอ่านสนุกกว่านะครับ

เรื่องสุดท้าย หอระฆังเเห่งซานมาร์โค เป็บบทความที่เล่าเรื่องชีวิตของสาวนักปฏิวัติ เเละคนรักของเธอ ชีวิตที่ขึ้นลงของทั้งสอง เส้นทางไหนที่คุ้มค่าที่จะทุ่มเทชีวิตให้ ระหว่างความรักหรือการปฏิวัติ
ในทั้งหมดสี่เรื่อง เรื่องนี้อ่านง่ายที่สุด ตรงไปตรงมาที่สุด เเละ อึดอัดที่สุดด้วย ไม่อยากสปอยอะไรมากกับเรื่องนี้ เเต่อ่านเเล้วก็เศร้าเหมือนเดิม จนเเบบว่า จะให้คนอ่านยิ้มกับอะไรซักเรื่องไม่ได้เลยเหรอครับคุณชิชกิน พ่อคู๊ณณณณณณณ !!

จบไปกับทั้ง 4 เรื่อง ผมต้องยอมรับว่ารัสเซียเป็นประเทศที่ผลิตงานในลักษณะเฉพาะที่บ่งบอกถึงความเป็นรัสเซียได้ชัด พอๆกับงานของญี่ปุ่น ที่เราอ่านเเล้วเเม้ไม่รู้ชื่อนักเขียน เราก็พอเดาได้งานนี่คืองานเขียนของประเทศอะไร สมกับวลี โหดสัสรัสเซียจริงๆ

[Mana Ravanbod · Rating 5 out of 5]

کتاب را بعد از «اقیانوس» جان چیور خواندم و سه بار خواندم و یادداشت نوشتم تا هم خط روایت و تمایز راویان برایم واضح شد هم قصه. نویسنده‌ی قدری‌ست. من را یاد ناباکف انداخت. وقتی می‌نویسد از چیزهایی می‌گریزد که نویسنده‌های متوسط توضیح می‌دهند، حتی به این بها که منِ خواننده‌ی ترجمه گاهی از دستش بدهم. آغاز و پایان داستان و بخصوص درهم‌رفتن روایت راویان برای درس دادن داستان کوتاه به کار می‌آید. این اولین کار شیشکین بود که دیدم و اولین بار بود که اسمش را می‌شنیدم.

[Mohaaaamin]

اگر می‌خواهی زندگی‌ات را بهتر کنی، دستخط‌ات را بهتر کن!

شیشکین مردی را روایت می‌کند که شغل‌اش در یک دادگاهِ کیفری و به‌‌عنوانِ گزارش‌نویس می‌گذرد. شغلی که مستقیمن در مجازات یا بخشش نقشی ندارد اما همه‌چیز از زیر قلم او بیرون می‌آید. همانطور که خودش هم می‌گوید:" قلمم مثل گذشته جیرجیر می‌کند، مجازات می‌کند و می‌بخشد."
او بی‌وقفه و مکررن شاهد پیش‌آمد‌های باورنکردنی و مشمئزکننده‌ای است که در نگاهِ اول دور از واقعیت بنظر می‌رسند اما رگه‌هایی از این اتفاقات در بیخِ گوش راوی هم روی می‌دهد.
اما راویِ میان‌سال، که با خشونت، جنایت و مرگ سر و کار دارد، به زیبایی پناه آورده و اوقاتِ فراغت‌اش را به تدریسِ خوش‌نویسی اختصاص می‌دهد. درواقع خوش‌نویسی با نظم‌اش، با تأکید‌ش بر درست‌نوشتن، برای او نوعی بازگرداندنِ نظم و کنترل بر دنیایی‌ست که از هم پاشیده. گویا او با هر حرفی که زیبا نوشته می‌شود، به پیکار با آشوب و پلیدی می‌رود:"امتحان کنید فقط یک لغت را طوری بنویسید که جلوه‌ی نظم و هماهنگی باشد، تا فقط با زیبایی و سلامتش تمام این دنیای وحشی، تمام این غارنشینی را به تعادل و توازن برساند."
شاگردانِ او را غالبن زنان تشکیل می‌دهند که مابین درس به گفتگو می‌نشینند و کتاب در واقع مجموعه‌ی همین گفتگوهاست. گفتگو‌هایی که شاید هم زاییده‌ی خیالِ اوست!

راوی همه‌چیزِ جهان را با همین خطوط و اصول خوش‌نویسی شرح می‌دهد.
او معتقد است از روی دستخط هر شخص می‌توان به درونیات و خلق‌و‌خوی او دست یافت. دانشی که گرافولوژی نام دارد و برای تعیینِ شخصیت در روان‌شناسی تحلیلی یا جاهای دیگر به کار گرفته می‌شود.

یادش بخیر، دورانِ مدرسه برای درسِ فرهنگ و هنر دبیری داشتیم که هیچ رقمه کلاه سرش نمی‌رفت. هر جلسه که تکالیفِ خوش‌نویسیِ بچه‌ها را بررسی می‌کرد کارش این بود: کاغذ را نزدیکِ شیشه‌ی عینک‌اش می‌بُرد، بعد نزدیکِ بینی می‌کرد و بو می‌کشید، و بعد هم چند کار دیگر، دستِ آخر سرش را بالا می‌گرفت و می‌گفت:"این دستخط زنانه است، برای خودت نیست" یا "نوشته‌ها تازه‌ان، زنگ تفریح نوشتی؟" گاهی حتی دقیق‌تر می‌شد و حالِ روحیِ دانش‌آموز حینِ نوشتنِ این سطور را هم به ارزیابی می‌گذاشت!

[Antonomasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some people I know on here would love this collection. Stories which blend modernist/po-mo/experimental with contemporary scenes riffing off Russian classics. Essays eruditely examining language, writing and translation, and cross-European cultural experiences drawing on life in the former Eastern Bloc and a later exile/expat existence in the West. (I preferred these essays to the one Dubravka Ugrešić book I've read. They have greater clarity without denying complexity.) And of interest to a couple of others, the expat existence is in Switzerland.
Didn't this kind of collection used to be commoner: both essays and short stories in one volume? (Can't remember specific examples.) It would exclude itself from too many prizes, important for sales now, that's probably why. It's a joy to read this juxtaposition of factual and fictional: I'd like there to be more books that did this, although few would be as good.
It's fascinating to see one writer's command of different forms side by side: writing (or enjoying) fiction in semi-opaque experimental styles does not mean one has to use that same approach to communicate the non-fictional, which is better served by a directness of no lesser quality, that allows the transmission of ideas without abstruse frilling but with evocative metaphor.
However, the two long modernist-style stories will be best appreciated by those with a thorough knowledge of Russian literature.

The Half-Belt Overcoat
Like several of the other pieces, this could pass for an autobiographical essay. Or a story? Or something Knausgaardianly inbetween? More info on Shishkin's life would be needed to determine. This one revolves around the narrator's late mother, a teacher in the USSR. Shishkin's range is dazzling, flowing between abstract philosophy, cosy Russian family scenes reminiscent of the great nineteenth century classics, piercing awareness of self and of circumspect self-expression under the Soviet regime. His statements are profound and polished; it feels as if they reach deeper than many contemporary others on the same subjects.

The Calligraphy Lesson
The first of two long-ish experimental short stories, and Shishkin's debut fiction publication, from 1993. I was feeling dizzy on my first reading of these, found it hard to focus and make sense of them, and returned to them a couple of days later after the realist/essay pieces, and feeling somewhat better and more able to take these in.
The 'calligraphy lesson' - a reflection on experience channelled into and processed through the act of writing - provides a frame for scenes of contemporary Russian life with the feel of the classics, related through conversation. First time round, I read the lesson as taught by a female teacher (following on from the mother in 'The Half-Belted Overcoat'), and the class consisting of a number of adults, all women apart from Evgeny Alexandrovich, who works in the criminal justice system, and whose conversation increasingly takes over from everyone else. Noticing that one of the women had become/was called Anna Arkadievna, and had a handful of similarities to Mme Karenina, I twigged that something was up with literary references, and searched various spellings of Evgeny's name hoping to work out "who he was", but nada. Translator Marian Schwartz's afterword elucidates that the female characters are references: Sofia Pavlovna from Griboedov’s play Woe from Wit; Tatiana Dmitrievna from Pushkin’s long poem Evgeny Onegin; Nastasia Filippovna from Dostoevsky’s Idiot; Anna Arkadievna from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; and Larochka (Lara) from Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Skimming back a second time, perhaps influenced by what I'd seen in the rest of the volume, as well as closer attention to certain sentences, I now read it as Evgeny Alexandrovich teaching a class consisting of the female characters from literature, who are variously flirtatious, upbraiding, or excessively self-effacing, and one of whom had an affair with him. Still did not come to a firm interpretation: perhaps something about the meaning of these characters to the straight male Russian reader/writer living some time after their creators?
[Schwartz on the calligraphy: The narrator embeds the intense emotion the word has acquired in this context into his painstaking description of how each letter is to be written, but for him the act of writing is simultaneously a kind of self-protection. By focusing on the physical act of writing he is able to distance himself from the extreme human misery he witnesses over and over.]

The Blind Musician
A long polyphonic story with voices slipping and sliding; another Russian family setting. I gave up on this the other day, and when returning to it - for why leave only a few dozen pages unfinished? - resorted to a tactic I've hardly ever used, noting down names and other details of characters to make sense of things. (What made me give up on Ulysses in my teens, at a time when I'd recently enjoyed Don Quixote, was the problem of working out who was speaking/'narrating'/in the room, and I felt similar blurred opacity here.) In 'The Blind Musician', a new narrator/speaker is normally preceded by a line space, but not always. Relationships between characters gradually became clearer through the story, but I had reservations as to whether this story was worth the work, as some bits required a third reading after new information arrived. Was I just uncovering a soap or is there a lot more here for the reader who srsly knows their Russian lit? Towards the latter, the largest hint was the wife of a university zoologist, Vera/Verochka, likely a Nabokov connection. Others were, if present, unfortunately lost on me. One point there was obvious reason for concealing from the reader, as it was concealed from many of the characters - but as it's also a cliche of modern fiction, it was disappointing to figure out that Alexei Pavlovich was not Zhenya's classmate but her tutor, and that they were having an affair. That also made it somewhat clearer why there seems to be a single paragraph narrated by the goddess Hera. Hera/Vera?. Other things, like finding that Aunt Mika didn't seem to be Zhenya's actual aunt but a family friend, started to feel in my exasperation like obfuscation for its own sake. Timescales were interestingly slippery: Roman, the titular "Blind Musician", seemed to grow up by perhaps 15 years over the course of the story, whilst Zhenya was almost always a university student. As I felt at time of reading, the balance of effort & reward was off-kilter (despite a few lovely phrases, e.g. To walk through the rooms with all their brazen mirrors acting all innocent. or I snaked the apple peel spirals around my arms like damp bracelets.) But I'd be interested to hear what others make of this piece.
[Warwick's review - highly recommended - later clarified the structure of this story.]

Language Saved
Opens with an absurdist excursion to James Joyce's tomb, and soon becomes a freewheeling essay on the limits of language and translation, written with one foot in Russia and the other in Switzerland (where Shishkin moved in the 90s to work as a translator).
The art of Russian speech has its own bottled up aroma, ingredients inherent only to the substance of Russian literature. The story of Bloom’s first and last day can be translated into Russian, but Joyce’s text rejects our national language’s substance. The words’ blood curdles. There can only be a “Russian Ulysses” with a “little man’s soul” à la Leskov.

Nabokov's Inkblot
A realist piece that may be truth or fiction. The narrator is scraping by as an interpreter in 1990s Switzerland. He is hired by a Russian oligarch to act as a dogsbody during a family holiday. The oligarch turns out not to be a stranger, but one of those acquaintances from school / college / old job who did a whole lot better than you did:
I remembered Kovalev as a skinny blond kid wearing a Komsomol pin that nobody else bothered to wear, and that he, too, took off when he left the Institute each day. But now, here he was, a “New Russian” in an expensive suit, complete with a stately paunch and premature bald spot...
Life was completely different now, but Kovalev still ended up on top. And I ended up on the bottom.
The narrator worships Nabokov but has never seen the room in a Montreux hotel where he used to live; crass Mr Oligarch decides he wants to stay in it.

Of Saucepans and Star-Showers
This could simply be described as reflections on the narrator/author's father, son and other relatives, and thus sound potentially commonplace. What makes it special is the expression of their lives as part of the great sweeping sky of Soviet and Russian history, and perhaps the way he is so wise about the larger aspects of life without being personally perfect.

The Bell Tower of San Marco
Microhistory: the story of a late 19th-early 20th century communist couple, Lydia Kochetkova and Fritz Brupbacher, whose letters Shishkin unearthed during research for his book Russian Switzerland. The self-sacrificing, ascetic nature of young Russian radicals is contrasted with the typical satisfied petit bourgeois Swiss - Brupbacher having been converted to communism by Kochetkova's intellect and fervour. Not having studied the Russian Revolution much since school, this story brought me several new perspectives. All the time between the curriculum sort of "things happening" in 1905 and 1917, the communists were still there and this is what some of them were up to. These two (and I daresay some of the others would) sound not like grown-ups as revolutionaries used to but - now on the other side of their age - as naive, middle-class extremist youngsters who had a lot to learn about poorer people, and who might, with time, have grown out of some of their more rigid philosophies. Russian revolutionaries were once just part of history, but now read as terrorists, with the extra meanings and alarm that term now carries.
Like a number of other more famous politically radical couples of the C19th and early C20th, these two decided to try and work out a more equal form of marriage that did not restrict either party; Kochetkova was the main impetus in this - the plan was not so much of a joint idea as for some. And as with others, and given the technology of the time, for a woman to be as autonomous as possible, she needed to have no children and therefore not much sex. One can't but think that their marriage and life would have been happier if not only contraception but modern therapy had been available; Kochetkova seems to have suffered psychological trauma from childhood abuse, and despite their passionate devotion to one another, she was prone to starting rows when they spent much time together in person. This had not stopped her from being a pioneer in fully qualifying as a doctor via study in Switzerland, where she had met Brupbacher, and then embarking on work attempting to tend to peasants in rural Russia, whilst her husband remained in Switzerland. Perhaps contemporary philosophies for the helping professions might have made some difference, such as accepting one can't fix everything and just doing what you can, taking care not to burn out. (Trying to educate people about germ theory and infection sounds like it would have been a particularly good idea.) But being so far from anywhere you can't even get a lock mended in good time after a break-in, and pretty much on your own, it's not surprising it would be daunting and dispiriting. She came to despair about how far the Russian peasantry in practice were from communist ideals of the proletariat, unable to accept that a lot of poor people just want a way to live comfortably, instead of rising up for a cause some incomer has told them about. Her wish to fix everything, right now (common at the time and not seen as something one needed to address in oneself) resulted in leaving medicine and a return to political insurgent activity, rejecting Brupbacher's desire to have children and a more conventional marriage. She wasn't very successful in her activism, having died in Siberia before the revolution even happened let alone seen this fear materialise: Actually I feel only dread. What if the revolution really happened? We made the mess and it’s for our children and grandchildren to clean it up. Sometimes I think it’s just as well I have no child. One of thousands of anonymous early Russian communists, known about as an individual only via her letters.
Whilst Shishkin doesn't overtly reference any female authors in the collection (maybe they're in less obvious allusions to works I've not read), and there are a few rather traditional views of women around*, the essay on Kochetkova might be something akin to feminist history.
(*If you search the text for mentions of 'women' or 'woman', - or part-word 'femin' - I did because I was trying to find a quote I'd forgotten to highlight - many of them have old-fashioned contexts or views attached. A tactic I'm surprised isn't more frequently used by those who foreground feminist criticism in their reviews.)

In a Boat Scratched on a Wall
About exile from a living language, potentially losing touch with everyday Russian as it changes -and again, the impossibility of true translation.
Not only can no novel really be translated, neither can any word. The experience of a language and the life lived through it and any specific word make languages with different pasts noncommunicating vessels. A past alive in words defies translation, especially that Russian past which was never a fact but always an argument in the neverending war the nation has waged with itself. It's a fundamentally [unnecessarily?] pessimistic view: taken to that extent, we can never truly communicate as individuals either due to personal strata of word-meaning and life history. Although he doesn't say people shouldn't bother. He's not anti-translation. But it's implied that even learning Russian as a foreigner - academically or via emigre relatives - wouldn't be enough. In this 2012 interview Shishkin has a more obviously optimistic outlook on writing in exile.
He sees centuries of autocratic rule embedded in the Russian language (perhaps implicitly like the abuse cycle): Being at once creator and creature of the nation’s reality, the Russian language is the form of existence, the body, of the totalitarian consciousness... Literary language arrived in the eighteenth century along with the idea of human dignity. We had no words for that language...
This language, which is meant to debase, reproduces itself with every generation of boys and girls. In and of itself, the literary language does not exist, it has to be created anew each time, and in solitude.
Shishkin focuses on the oppression of ordinary Russians here, such as all [his] nameless Tambov ancestors, who hacked and were hacked, executed and were executed. The phrasing is very amenable to universalising beyond Russia, though one can imagine that readers from the unmentioned former Soviet republics, Eastern Bloc countries and indigenous populations - places with different native languages, places where said ancestors may have been sent to fight - might view all this a little differently. The oppressive aspects would weigh more heavily than its literary ideas of human dignity given that their cultures were or are suppressed in favour of Russian.

The word translated in this essay and this collection as 'slaves' - was it the same word that in a classic would be translated as 'serfs'? Whenever that, or the idea of the USSR as 'a prison nation' came up, I was reminded of the - probably small number of - GR posters who consider that use of such terms in discussion of Eastern Bloc communism, by writers who experienced it, is appropriative of American slavery or the experiences of Global South countries colonised by Western Europeans. (Which is actually kind of un-PC itself - also I've only ever seen it used by young Anglo people - it presupposes that what has been done by the US and Western Europe is the whole world's reference point, to which others must defer their own national experiences.) The translators were probably not even aware of this line of thought to ensure they used the more Russian-associated 'serfs', but it loomed at me here - a brick wall it's stupid to look at again, never mind bash one's head on.
In this collection, Shishkin makes one or two faux-pas I'd agree were a touch insensitive, unlike the above, but he is nonetheless in agreement with those who dwell on the political power of words in general: When everyone lives by prison camp laws, language’s mission is everyone’s cold war with everyone else. If the strong must inevitably beat the feeble, the language’s mission is to do this verbally. Humiliate him, insult him, and steal his ration. Language as a form of disrespect for the individual.

One one hand, I sort of agree with another review saying that Calligraphy Lesson could do with a wider variety of characters; if one treats the whole thing as a story collection, there are rather a lot of literary Russian chaps often with connections to Switzerland. Yet if this is taken as something closer to an essay collection and/or creative memoir (with a couple of short stories in the middle) then it's obvious why the author's viewpoint is central, and the book simply has much to offer in both content and style.

[Ali Mousighidan · Rating 3 out of 5]

باید یه دست مریزاد به آقای گلکار گفت بابت این انتخاب های خوب.
روایتی از داستان زندگی معلم خوشنویسی که انگار داستان همه ی شهروندان روسیه است. طنز داستان شبیه به کارهای چخوف بود.

[Moshtagh hosein · Rating 5 out of 5]

به نظرم مقدمه این اثر به تنهایی بیانیه ای هست برای تمام نویسندگانی که از کشور خود رانده و یا از حاکمیت به اصطلاح نماینده کشور خود دلخور هستند و دستمریزاد به آبتین گلکار با ترجمه این شاهکار کوتاه.
شاید بشه نویسنده رو یک داستایوفسکی مدرن نامید.


میخائیل پاولوویچ شیشکین (متولد 18 ژانویه 1961) نویسنده روسی و تنها نویسنده ای است که موفق به کسب جایزه بوکر روسی (2000)، پرفروش ملی روسیه (2005) و جایزه کتاب بزرگ (2010) شد. کتابهای وی به 30 زبان ترجمه شده است. او همچنین به زبان آلمانی می نویسد.
پشت جلد:
میخاییل شیشکین از مشهورترین نویسندگان معاصر روسیه و یکی از سیاسی ترین آن هاست و می توان اولین کار جدی ادبی او را درس خوشنویسی (۱۹۹۳) دانست. شیشکین پس از آن، رمان های بسیاری را به رشته ی تحریر درآورد که تقریبا تمامی آن ها معتبرترین جوایز ادبی روسیه را از آن خود کردند.
در این داستان معلمی که خوشنویسی تعلیم می دهد شرح حال خود را برای شاگردش باز می گوید؛ روایتی که می تواند داستان زندگی همه ی شهروندان روسیه باشد؛ دردناک و در عین حال طنزآمیز.

آنا آر کادیونا،‌ متوجه نیستید که از دست دادن قوه‌ی تعقل امتیازی است مخصوص برگزیدگان؛ پاداشی است برای خواص، در حالی که ما عاقلان داریم بابت چیزی مکافات پس می‌دهیم. و مهم‌تر از همه آنکه کسی نیست از او بپرسیم بابت چه؟

‏«به انسان‌های فانی این قدرت عطا نشده که خط صاف بکشند. خط صاف ایده‌آلی است که در طبیعت یافت نمی‌شود و تعداد بی‌شماری خط کج در صدد رسیدن به آن هستند.»

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The experience of a language and the life lived through it turns languages with different pasts into noncommunicating vessels. The past that lives in words does not yield to translation, especially that Russian past which was never a fact but always an argument in the endless war the nation has waged against itself.

This is an exceptional collection of short stories. There really isn't a misstep amongst them; by the time I was finishing the last story I'd already placed an order for Maidenhair (long on my want list, finally prioritized up to "buy").

There is a lot of space in the collection dedicated to language and translation, which is one of my favorite literary themes of the last five years or so; so this definitely hit the right notes for me - but it also hits more universal notes (nostalgia, memory, love/loss) to where it should have something for everyone. The translation(s)/writing is exceptional - not quite as poetic as that which I saw in my brief perusal of The Light and the Dark, but exceptionally composed, shining with warmth and intelligence.

[Sini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mikhail Sjisjkin is een geweldenaar: hij heeft zo'n beetje alle grote Russische literatuurprijzen gewonnen, en geldt voor velen als de grootste levende Russische schrijver. Zelf heb ik zijn prachtromans "Onvoltooide liefdesbrieven" en "Venushaar" ook uitbundig in jubelrecensies bewonderd: twee onnavolgbare romans die zo rijk en grillig waren van stijl en structuur dat ik ze twee keer lezen moest om er ook maar iets van te snappen, maar toen ik ze snapte was ik dan ook meteen helemaal flabbergasted.

Nu is dan een bundel verhalen en persoonlijke essays van hem uitgekomen, die naar mijn idee voor Sjisjkin-liefhebbers een must is en voor potentiele maar nog aarzelende Sjisjkin-liefhebbers een mooie introductie. Want deze bundel offreert ons de kenmerkende Sjisjkin-thema's in de kenmerkende vloeiende Sjijskin-stijl, maar in gecondenseerde en dus behapbare vorm. Ook het voor zijn romans zo kenmerkende gejongleer met verschillende door elkaar lopende verhaallijnen en perspectieven is hier veel minder aan de orde. Zelf vond ik dat juist een van de meest overweldigende kenmerken van zijn romans waar ik zeer van genoot, dus vind ik die romans nog beter dan deze verhalenbundel, maar anderen zullen juist de bundel verkiezen omdat zonder die grilligheid van structuur de lezer minder afgeleid wordt van de fraaie motieven en thema's, de ontroerende verhaalelementen en de vaak prachtige stijl. En daardoor is juist die bundel ook geschikt als eerste kennismaking en voorbereiding op zijn romans, te meer omdat hij in de persoonlijke essays veel moois en verhelderends zegt over zijn motieven bij het schrijven van die romans. Zelf zou ik de bundel Sjisjkin-light willen noemen, omdat die voor mij zo inspirerende grilligheid van zijn romans hier veel minder aanwezig is. Maar ik vind het wel weer een geweldige Sjisjkin.

Sjisjkin is hoe dan ook sterk op de korte baan: hij heeft weinig woorden nodig om een veelkantig personage neer te zetten, een gevoel van schoonheid op te roepen, of werelden van emoties over te brengen. Zijn verhalen zijn op dat punt net zo sterk als die van klassiekere Russen als Tsjechov, Gogol, Tolstoj, Nabokov. Wel schrijft hij soms want intellectualistischer dan met name de oude Russen, omdat hij vaak ook expliciet schrijft over aard en waarde van taal, kunst, literatuur en de literaire traditie. Niet alleen in zijn essays, maar juist ook in zijn verhalen. In die verhalen combineert hij bovendien beschouwingen over taal en literatuur met allerlei verwijzingen, bijvoorbeeld door personages uit Russische romans te laten optreden of door met m.n. klassieke vormen als de brief-roman te spelen. De verhalen hebben daardoor nogal een meta-fictioneel gehalte: schrijven over aard en waarde van het schrijven, literatuur over literatuur, verhalen over het mysterieuze wonder dat er zoiets kan bestaan als verhalen. Voor sommige lezers en recensenten is dat een minpunt: al die meta-fictie leidt maar af van het verhaal zelf. Ik geniet hier echter enorm van. Ten eerste zijn de verhalen niet alleen maar meta-fictie: ze bieden alle genietingen op het gebied van stijl, plot, emotie, ontroering en schoonheid die je van normale verhalen mag verwachten. Ze zijn dus absoluut niet droog, net zomin als zijn essays, die behalve heel theoretisch ook intrigerend persoonlijk zijn. Maar belangrijker nog is dat alle meta-fictie, dus al dat geschrijf over aard en waarde van dat schrijverschap, voor mij juist veel schoonheid en ontroering aan de verhalen toevoegt.

Neem nu het begin van het eerste verhaal, getiteld "De kalligrafieles". Dat verhaal begint dus zo: "De hoofdletter, Sofja Palovna, is het begin van alle beginpunten [...]. Hij is zoiets als de eerste adem, de kreet van een pasgeborene, zo u wilt. Zo-even was er nog niets, absoluut niets, leegte. En de volgende duizend jaar was er misschien nog steeds niets, maar dan schrijft je pen, gehoor gevend aan een ontoegankelijke, hogere wil, opeens een hoofdletter en weet van geen ophouden meer. Door tegelijkertijd de eerste beweging van de pen naar dit punt te zijn, symboliseert hij zowel de hoop als de absurditeit van het zijn. In de eerste letter ligt, als in een embryo, het hele hierop volgende leven tot het eind toe besloten - de geest, het ritme, de intensiteit, de vorm". Oké, smaken verschillen, en schiet mij maar lek, maar IK vind dit prachtig opgeschreven. En ontroerend bovendien, zeker in combinatie met een andere uitspraak verderop in hetzelfde verhaal: ""probeert u desnoods een enkel woord te schrijven, maar zo dat het louter harmonie is en dat het met zijn regelmatigheid en schoonheid een tegenwicht vormt tegen heel deze bezopen wereld, heel deze holenmentaliteit". De bezopenheid en morsigheid van de wereld kiert inderdaad aan alle kanten door dit verhaal heen, en de wanhoop eveneens: de werkelijke wereld ontbeert in de beleving van de personages echt elke harmonie. De in kalligrafie en schriftuur na te streven perfectie staat haaks op het werkelijke leven en de natuur. Echter, "de perfectie ervan verleent dadelijk iets vreemds, ja, iets vijandigs aan alles wat bestaat, aan de natuur zelf, alsof een andere, hogere wereld, een wereld van harmonie, deze ruimte aan het rijk der wormen heeft ontworsteld!". En exact daardoor leidt schrijven tot "een vreemd, onuitsprekelijk gevoel. Dat is pas echt geluk!".

Ik ken dit motief al uit Sjisjkins romans, die ik ook daarom zeer bewonder: het motief van het onvoorwaardelijke geloof in de schoonheid van literatuur. Dat is bij Sjisjkin ook duidelijk een geloof tegen beter weten in, omdat het gepaard gaat met het besef dat literatuur onwerkelijk is en weerloos, en met het besef dat niets bestand is tegen de brute werkelijkheid van politieke willekeur, eindigheid, ellende, dood en verval. Maar literatuur kan ons wel voor even helemaal vervoeren, voor even in een totaal andere realiteit verplaatsen die de gure goorheid van alledag voor even overwint. En DAT moeten we koesteren. Aldus Sjisjkin, in zijn fenomenale romans. En ook in de verhalen en essays van "De kalligrafieles". In een van zijn essays zegt hij dit ook heel pregnant en ontroerend: hij noemt daarin de Russiche taal van alledag (van het Kremlin en de kranten) een "taal van ongebreidelde kracht en vernedering", maar "de Russische literatuur is de bestaansvorm van het niet-totalitaire bewustzijn in Rusland". En zelfs: "De taal van de Russische literatuur is een ark. Een reddingspoging. Een egelstelling. Een eilandje van woorden, waar de menselijke waardigheid bewaard moet worden". En: "de roman is een bootje. Je moet de woorden leven inblazen om het bootje echt te laten worden. Om erin te kunnen klimmen en weg te varen uit dit solitaire leven naar een plek waar we allemaal liefdevol worden verwelkomd". Ook in zijn verhalen brengt Sjisjkin dit op prachtige, zij het meer impliciete wijze over. Bijvoorbeeld in een verhaal waarin twee door brute politieke realiteit en persoonlijke onvolkomenheden van elkaar gescheiden geliefden toch een tijdelijk provisorisch geluk vinden, maar alleen in hun liefdesbrieven. Alleen in de wereld van hun correspondentie ontstijgen zij hun onvermogen. Of ook in verhalen waarin gemijmerd wordt over ervaringen van stilte, van onuitspreekbaarheid, van het buiten-talige dat we nooit kunnen grijpen met onze botte gedachten en simpele woorden, maar waar we soms even een glimp van op kunnen vangen dankzij de literatuur. En het mooie van Sjisjkin vind ik dan dat hij niet alleen schrijft over zulke glimpen, maar mij ook veel van zulke glimpen biedt. Waardoor ook deze bundel weer een ark is waarin ik graag een paar dagen heb kunnen mee varen.

Dat ook al het nog onvertaalde werk van Sjisjkin maar snel vertaald moge worden. En dat hij nog maar veel moge schrijven. Zodat ik nog vaker kan wonen in zijn werelden, die misschien onwerkelijk en weerloos zijn maar zoveel minder grofstoffelijk dan de wereld waarin ik dagelijks woon.

[Kaveh Rezaie · Rating 3 out of 5]

مردی داستان زندگی‌اش را میان تدریس خوشنویسی تعریف می‌کند. شاگردها خانم هستند و بطور پیوسته و ناگهانی عوض می‌شوند. ما از نامی که راوی به زبان می‌اورد می‌فهمیم که الان دارد برای کس دیگری حرف می‌زند. آن‌ها هم کمی از زندگی خودشان می‌گویند.
غم داشت و خوب بود. ترجمه عالی.

[Fran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading these pieces I feel in a dream state (sometimes one not so pleasant). I love the flow of his ideas, the worlds that he paints fictional and real.

[Mehdi Akbarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

یه داستان حدودا ۶۰ صفحه ای که اگه ۶۰۰ صفحه هم بود میخوندمش. واقعا قشنگ بود

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book from Deep Vellum Publishing marks the first collection of Mikhail Shishkin's stories in English. Shishkin is a highly-regarded writer in contemporary Russian literature, a winner of multiple literary prizes whose name comes up with the likes of Haruki Murakami and Krasznahorkai László for potential candidacy for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Shishkin's writing is typical of the literary genre in its skillful achievement of complex, stylistic prose to evoke poignant themes common to all people, including love, life, family, and death. His particular style is impressionistic, which matches the characteristics of his dominating theme: language. The translation required for bringing these stories to Anglophones who cannot read Russian is wonderfully fitting with the primary concern of Shishkin's prose. Through the narrators Shishkin argues that language is a barrier, something imperfect that can never express an exact truth. Twice he points to the story of the Tower of Babel as emblematic (the start of) the separations that language engenders.

Yet Shishkin's stories explore this concept a bit more deeply, particularly in light of what language is able accomplish, despite its limitations through the art of prose, of the story. His debut 1993 story that gives the Calligraphy Lesson collection its name most strongly delves into this. In this story Shishkin considers words and their formation, whether through the process of basic writing, the art of calligraphy, or spoken and the power that they have to convey meaning both implicitly and explicitly. Moreover, he explores how language can be used to interpret complex human emotions and experience, such as the soul-numbing violence faced by the police investigator in the story.

Language allows organization of fragments, it allows the impression of a truth to be conveyed through imperfect means through the interpretations it permits. In one brilliantly written courtroom scene in the title story characters consider one word in Russian and the meaning, the 'baggage', that each letter of that word brings along with it, how they resonate in sound and appearance when written. Earlier in the story, Shishkin alternates scenes describing the composition of calligraphic text with scenes that mirror points in aspects of human interactions. Thus language itself is a translation, a transformation of ideas.

Aside from the repeated theme of language in general, Shishkin's stories are also firmly embedded within the historical context of Russian literary history. (Footnotes and one brief, but very informative afterward are provided by the translators to give some grounding to readers.) The most recent story from Shishkin, 2013's "Nabokov's inkblot" illustrates this condition most directly with a character-driven tale that features a man considering his present, the weight that we attach to memories of the past, of historical significance broad or personal, and how they may be viewed quite differently in the light of the present moment.

The only limitation from the collection, from perhaps Shishkin's short fiction in general, is the question of where it has grown - or can grow. His mastery of themes shines here, and he follows that dictum of writing what one knows best. His stories all feature male protagonists that resemble their author, literary-inclined Russians, some of whom like the author spend time residing in Switzerland. Can he write more than this? Does he need to even, if this where he excels, where he has something to say. For immediate purposes such questions are somewhat moot. This particular collection is short enough that the thematic repetition doesn't try the reader, it is the perfect length for the stories to remain engaging. Additionally, stories vary in how far they extend the themes symbolically into the characters. For instance "The Blind Musician" considers language further within the realm of sight, with both the fallibility and unique abilities that blindness could offer."In a Boat Scratched on a Wall" on the other hand is less of a narrative, something closer to an essay.

Books like this make me thankful for publishers of all kinds that support and facilitate translation of the world's literature into English for the US market. In this case it offers accessibility to a major figure who I would otherwise be ignorant. Deep Vellum Publishing is a Dallas-based nonprofit literary arts organization that specializes in getting translations to market. You can find out more about the organization, their books and their translators at their site. One translator of many of the stories in Calligraphy Lesson, Marion Schwartz, was just shortlisted for the 2015 Read Russia prize for her translation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Through 5th June 2015 you can enter to win a copy of the Calligraphy Lesson collection through Goodreads' Giveaway program.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this from Deep Vellum Publishing via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review that originally appeared on www.Reading1000Lives.com

[Nami · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's no doubt about it - Mikhail Shishkin is a very gifted writer. His semi- autobiographical short stories, inspired by his own life experiences, painted a vivid picture of Russian culture, literature and language. Language became a living thing, moving and painting the pictures he sought for us readers to see.

Russia is an enigmatic country to me. Having read about international history from afar, and the highly processed versions of news in media today, one can never really discern a true picture of any nation. This book really made me think about the long, tempestuous, war-torn years of the former USSR and now Russia.

More than that, I acutely felt the pull of Language as a magical thing that creates, misleads and destroys communication. I also felt disoriented by some of his stories, especially 'The Blind Musician'. Translated books are a tricky thing. Coming from a non-English speaking country myself, I can appreciate the undercurrents of history and culture as well as the struggle still faced by my countrymen. Bangladesh is, after all, still a young nation.

"The experience of a language and the life lived through it turns languages with different pasts into noncommunicating vessels. The past that lives in words does not yield to translation, especially that Russian past which was never a fact but always an argument in the endless war the nation has waged against itself.”

Indeed! What a treasure it would be to be able to read books in their original language!

"Each word individually and all words taken together only exacerbate the impossibility of interlingual understanding and horizontal communication. Ever since the Tower of Babel, the task of language has been to misunderstand.”

How true! What we feel through actions is always misled once put into words, maybe because language is also used as a device for deception. How do I know you really mean what you say? Which brings me to the one sentence that struck my heart -

"Words don’t mean anything anymore.”

We have overused, misused, underused many words, stripping them off their original weight and meaning. Heavy words like Love, Friendship, Honesty, Trust, Pain, Sadness, Happiness and countless others have seized to have the gravity they once had - now they are only used in wrong, selfish contexts. Maybe it is up to the writers to breathe new life into these word corpses, so we may use them in all their glory again.

[Chrysa Chouliara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe the best book I have read in in the last 3 years. I read in one breath within 8 hours. It felt complex and breathtaking.

[Erin Bottger (Bouma) · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you read the 8 stories in this book, you enter another world, Shishkin's, where language is the key to communication or, the inverse, the obstacle to understanding.
In "Calligraphy Lesson" the narrator takes testimonies and records crimes for the police (and teaches calligraphy on the side). He longs to elevate his art but what he must write is so sordid:
"At work I deal with stories you could never even imagine, but you know I've gotten used to it and I do my job. One man, for instance, quarreled with his wife and slaughtered her and their two children with the bread knife. The older was four and the younger was an infant. Then he came to his senses and started to slit his own veins, and while he was bleeding, he set fire to the apartment and jumped out the window... You wake up, have breakfast, get ready for work, and you already know what's going to happen. One man choked his own mother with a stocking and carried the body to the outhouse piece by piece, and I said to him, "Please sign here." And so it goes, day after day, year after year. If it's not Peter, it's Nikolai; if it's not the doting father, it's the loving son. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, a hundred years from now. The words, even those are the same: I didn't see it. I wasn't there. It wasn't me...
They do things even they can't imagine, and I tell them, Write, now, to keep from losing your mind, write a final word not in some lapidary cursive font but, say, an elegant bubbly Rondo, in blurred letters that repeat, but the verdict is in littera fracture with flourishes, or Gothic logjams, or Batard, or Coule, or whatever strikes your fancy, one page like this, another like that. Even if you only write one word, to say nothing of a page, make it harmony itself, so that its regularity and beauty offset that whole crazy world, that whole caveman mindset."
In "The Blind Musician", Shishkin takes on the perspective and sensitivities of a blind man, Roman.
"Getting oriented in the so-called visible dimension doesn't necessarily mean seeing. I assure you, Evgenia Dmitrievna, any blind person orients himself as well as you can. That's not the main thing, you know, it's trivial. It's much easier than you think. After all, no two doors sound and no two rooms smell alike. Believe me, all it takes is a rustle, the creak of a floorboard, a cough, to know the size of a room, if it's a strange one, and whether anyone's in it, if it's your own. Empty and filled spaces sound different."
He later admits: "Naturally, Evgenia Dmitrievna, there are definite drawbacks to any situation. I don't like street orchestras. Drumming is to me what a thick fog is to you. Or a snowfall, for instance. Then it's like even the streetcar's wearing felt boots. Or new shoes-- that's a torture only the blind can understand... I'll admit, I don't find the way you slip me thicker, sturdier dishes so I won't break them very nice., Evgenia Dmitriovna. On the other hand, believe me, the nonsee-er has his advantages. Why else would the philosophers of antiquity have blinded themselves? Evidently, they understood that your visible world, which you treasure so, is no more than tinsel, smoke, zilch... Of course, it's easy to cheat a blind person, but you can't fool him... Words lie, the voice never."

One story I really enjoyed was "Nabokov's Inkblot" where the needy emigre intelligentsia translator in Switzerland is paid well to escort a family of New Russians to Nabokov's hotel, the Montreux-Palace. Of course, the trip has a completely different purpose and meaning for the two men.

Another of special note was "The Bell Tower of San Marco" of two lovers, medical students, the Russian Lydia Kochetkova and the Swiss Fritz Brupbacher, who met in 1897 in Zurich. She was a radical revolutionary and soon converted him and together they committed themselves to the cause. They married, remained celibate and then separated, she back to rural Russia and he to practice medicine and organize in Switzerland. The rest of the story is told via their exchanged letters and short and cantankerous annual meetups. Before long, Lydia loses her enthusiasm for winning over the peasantry and becomes disgusted with the coarseness and cruelty of Russian life. Over time she loses faith in even the revolution, visits a sanatorium on Lake Boden and is arrested on her return to Russia in July 1909. In exile, she c0ontracts typhus and Fritz travels to her but, it turned out to be the turning point for him. He, finally tells her he wants a divorce as he has no more illusions about their future together. She continues to write to him until war breaks out. It's a tragic and telling tale of revolutionary zeal and wasted potential and of idealistic foolhardiness.

Shishkin writes brilliantly by creating characters and situations that allow him to play and reveal truth with his prose. Working with universal themes, he captures the particular through shifting narrative styles and perspectives within a text, yielding a patchwork compilation whose whole is more than the sum of its parts, coming together through language. He, himself, had broad experience translating for Russian emigres moving to Europe and he is here ably served by four translators.

I look forward to reading and enjoying much more of his prize-winning fiction.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enticing, but brings a strain of distasteful mysticism to the tropes of writing and linguistification. The last two story-essays are indisputably and especially good. Come for the prose but get your big ideas on language elsewhere.

[Rahil Goli · Rating 3 out of 5]

میدونی چیه؟ من اونقدر ادبیات روسیه رو کنکاش نکردم اما همیشه پس ذهنم یک چیزی قلقلک میشد که چرا اینقدر چیزای سخت آسون و چیزای آسون سخت به نظر میان به قلم نویسنده‌های روس؟!
الانم باز این سوال عین خوره افتاده به جونم که خب چرا؟ تو غذاشون چی میریزن که این‌قدر متفاوت میشن؟ مگه هوایی که نفس میکشن چی توشه؟ (البته درسته که شیشکین به سوئیس مهاجرت کرد.) مگه تو چه بستری بزرگ میشن که از همه لحاظ چارچوب‌های ذهنیشون این‌قدر توفیر داره؟
باید مغز یک نویسنده‌ی روس رو شکافت و روی این‌ها تحقیق کرد، اینطوری نمیشه.

[Héctor Genta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressionante prova di bravura di uno scrittore che a soli 26 anni dimostra di aver letto e assimilato i grandi classici della letteratura russa. Le memorie di Larianov è un romanzone di stampo ottocentesco nel quale Shishkin ci descrive la parabola esistenziale di un uomo “tenero, sognatore, presuntuoso, stupido ed ordinario” (per usare solo alcuni degli aggettivi con i quali il protagonista verrà descritto nelle pagine del libro). Il giovane Larianov è un idealista che crede nel futuro, nella patria, nella buona fede degli uomini e nella possibilità di cambiare le cose. La vita militare lo farà scontrare con una realtà diversa da quella che aveva previsto e lo spingerà a ritirare la testa nel carapace tornando alla rassicurante mediocrità della dacia in campagna e sposando la ragazzina che lo amava. Ma Larianov non è uomo d'azione ed anche in un ambito più ristretto rispetto a quello militare non riuscirà ad imporre la sua personalità a causa dell'usuale mancanza di nerbo, preferendo di nuovo la fuga al confronto con la realtà. A Kazan si innamorerà, ma una volta respinto perché giudicato “ordinario” non farà nulla per conquistare il cuore dell'amata ma si limiterà a viverle accanto come molti altri. L'insurrezione in Polonia sembra poter risvegliare la coscienza di Larianov, ma si rivelerà l'ennesimo fuoco di paglia perché il disincanto, la convinzione di non poter cambiare le cose (l'oblomovismo, direi) alla fine avranno la meglio soffocando gli ultimi rigurgiti di idealismo al punto che Larianov finirà per tradire e mandare agli arresti l'amico. Un tradimento per paura, per difendere se stesso, ma – quel che più conta – un tradimento consumato senza sensi di colpa, addirittura con un sorriso. Ancora un romanzo su nicevò, sul fatalismo e la rassegnazione che sembrano essere tratti dei quali l'anima russa non riesce a liberarsi. Larianov non è un sempliciotto, ha capacità di analisi e vede perfettamente quali sono le cose che non vanno e perché, ha ideali e voglia di metterli in pratica, ma il muro che si trova davanti sembra un ostacolo troppo alto da superare, tanto da spingerlo a ripiegare su una vita a luci spente, senza sogni né speranze. Sopravvivere, appunto, non vivere.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice collection, though perhaps not an ideal introduction to the author (I say, having never read him before). Shishkin is meant to be a great stylist, which doesn't come through in any of these translations. They swing wildly between academic obscurity and a philistine use of slang, thus combining the two worst tendencies of contemporary prose. It's also a little discomforting that the worst pieces here, by far, are the most fictional (special dishonor going to the ridiculously boring 'Blind Musician'), while the best are either essays, literary anecdotes, and naked memoir. That's not a problem, except that Shishkin is meant to be a great novelist, so presumably he's not totally at sea when it comes to fiction. Anyway, I've seen enough here to give Maidenhair a go, if only because Shishkin (as he appears from the essays here) is a militant defender of literature and language; I grow very tired of writers who are always dithering about whether what they do is worthwhile. It is, okay? Unless you're writing utter crap, it's worthwhile.

Also, typically good book production from the excellent Deep Vellum press.

[Mohammad Hosein Torabi · Rating 2 out of 5]

- یوگنی الکساندرویچ، شما دیوانه‌اید!

- آنا آرکادیونا، متوجه نیستید که از دست‌دادن قوهٔ تعقل امتیازی است مخصوص برگزیدگان؛ پاداشی است برای خواص. درحالیکه ما عاقلان داریم بابت چیزی مکافات پس می‌دهیم. و مهم‌تر از همه آنکه کسی نیست از او بپرسیم بابت چه؟
****
این داستان کوتاه گویا اولین کار جدی ادبی اوست و حقیقت امر این است که چنگی به دل نمی زند.
تنها شاید بتوان گفت که فرم جالب و نوآورانه بود.
ویراستاری کتاب مشکل جدی در مشخص کردن متکلم گفتگوها داشت، این مشکل بیشتر به چشم می آمد مخصوصا هنگامی که مکالمه ها به درازا می کشید.

در انتها اگر روس خوان هستید توصیه می کنم این کتاب را از دوستتان امانت بگیرید و بخوانید! خالی از لطف هم نیست!

[Chloe Sproule · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some were great; others a bit much. My favourites were: The Bell Tower of San Marco, The Half-Belt Overcoat, and Of Saucepans and Star-Showers.

[ReyhanehBahrami · Rating 3 out of 5]

شروع داستان خوب بود اما در میانه توضیحات اضافه باعث گم شدن روند اصلی داستان میشد و در آخر پایان جالبی نداشت.

[امیرمحمد حیدری · Rating 2 out of 5]

از ایده تا عمل عالی بود. پیش‌بردن خوشنویسی و مسائل زندگی به‌صورت موازی، خیلی خوب درآمده بود‌.

[Bas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Niet mijn boek. Ik snap niet veel van de verhalen, ze zullen ongetwijfeld goed zijn als ik de recensies lees maar ik zie het niet.

[Bahman Bahman · Rating 2 out of 5]

بخش از کتاب که قصه‌ معلمی است که هنر خوشنویسی را آموزش می‌دهد: "آنا آرکادیونا، متوجه نیستید که از دست‌دادن قوهٔ تعقل امتیازی است مخصوص برگزیدگان؛ پاداشی است برای خواص. درحالیکه ما عاقلان داریم بابت چیزی مکافات پس می‌دهیم. و مهم‌تر از همه آنکه کسی نیست از او بپرسیم بابت چه؟ "

[Alireza Najafi · Rating 2 out of 5]

نپسندیدم.

[Bart Van Overmeire · Rating 4 out of 5]

De Russen, ze konden vroeger al schrijven en nu nog steeds. Michaïl Sjisjkin heeft enkele knappe kortverhalen geschreven, van tranches de vie tot essays over taal en literatuur.

Het mooiste verhaal gaat over een koppel anarchistische sociaalrevolutionairen in het begin van de vorige eeuw die gescheiden van elkaar leven: zij in Rusland, hij in Zürich. "In onze brieven lijken we heel close te zijn, maar wanneer we elkaar zien verwijderen we ons van elkaar. .... Ik krijg de indruk dat we in feite allebei bang zijn voor onze ontmoetingen. We zoeken onze toevlucht in de brieven. Onze correspondentie is een poging te ontsnappen aan ons onvermogen om met elkaar of apart van elkaar te leven."

'Correct words are rotten. Incorrect words can be art or just incorrect', vertelde hij enkele weken geleden bij Passa Porta. Deze verhalen zijn zonder twijfel incorrect. En nog mooier voorgelezen in het Russisch.