50 Writers: An Anthology of 20th Century Russian Short Stories

by Mark Lipovetsky (Editor), Valentina Brougher (Editor), Frank J. Miller (Translator)

The largest, most comprehensive anthology of its kind, this volume brings together significant, representative stories from every decade of the 20th century. It includes the prose of officially recognized writers and dissidents, both well-known and neglected or forgotten, plus new authors from the end of the 20th century.

Contents
Once upon a time / Leonid Andreyev -- The invoker of the beast / Fyodor Sologub -- Gambrinus / Aleksandr Kuprin -- The little devil / Aleksei Remizov -- Thus life passes / Elena Guro -- Four people ; Scenes from the life of the worker Pantelei Grymzin / Arkady Averchenko -- Black iris / Nadezhda Teffi -- The red crown / Mikhail Bulgakov -- Black magic ; The female fish / Mikhail Zoschenko -- Gedali ; The rabbi ; The rabbi's son / Isaac Babel -- Family man / Mikhail Sholokhov -- Outgoing paper no. 27 / Lev Lunts -- The gardener of the Emir of Bukhara / Vsevolod Ivanov -- The viper / Aleksei Tolstoy -- The flood / Evgeny Zamyatin -- Doubting Makar / Andrei Platonov -- Blue notebook number 10 ; Old women tumbling out ; Kushakov the carpenter ; A dream ; The start of a very nice summer day ; The lynching / Daniil Kharms -- Lake, cloud, tower / Vladimir Nabokov -- The smoky glass goblet / Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky -- Tanya / Ivan Bunin -- The tenants / Andrei Sinyavsky -- Eulogy / Varlam Shalamov -- The house with a turret / Fridrikh Gorenshtein -- "Victory" / Vasily Aksyonov -- Hands / Yuli Daniel -- A German in felt boots / Konstantin Vorobyov -- My uncle of the highest principles / Fazil Iskander -- Chudik ; I believe! / Vasily Shkshin -- Bread for a dog / Vladimir Tendryakov -- You cried bitterly in your sleep / Yury Kazakov -- Little arm, leg, cucumber... / Yury Dombrovsky -- My older cousin / Sergei Dovlatov -- Girl of my dreams / Bulat Okudzhava -- The fakir / Tatiana Tolstaya -- Galoshes / Viktor Erofeyev -- Surrealism in a proletarian district / Vladimir Makanin -- Passing through / Vladimir Sorokin -- The young / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- Butterfly. 1987 / Leonid Yuzefovich -- The last war story / Oleg Ermakov -- A short history of paint-ball in Moscow / Viktor Pelevin -- The queen of spades / Lyudmila Ulitskaya -- More and more angels ; The Samurai's dream / Yury Buida -- Currency / Yury Mamleyev / Snow falls ever so quietly / Irina Polyanskaya -- Teachers without pupils, or from under the rubble into the mausoleum of thine / Lev Rubinshtein -- The lord of the Steppes / Vladimir Tuchkov -- Never / Lyudmila Petrushevskaya -- Experience in demonstrating mourning / Marina Vishnevetskaya -- The dump / Andrei Levkin.

Genres: Short Stories, Russian Literature, Russia

792 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[E.P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

When teaching a survey class of Russian literature, one of the more vexing questions is which text to pick. You want to give students an idea of the breadth and richness of Russian literature, but not overwhelm them with impossible page counts. Of course they SHOULD read "And Quiet Flows the Don," "Life and Fate," "Doctor Zhivago," "The Gulag Archipelago," and many more things beside, but let's face it: neither they nor you are going to get through all that in one semester. So turning to a short story collection is a necessary compromise.

For my survey class last fall, I decided to try something new and experiment with "50 Writers," and I felt it worked quite well. Although by its nature it includes none of the epics for which Russian literature is justly famous, it does have a sampling of most of the major writers of the 20th century, as well as a number of lesser-known but still important ones. It contains some of the usual suspects--e.g., excerpts from Babel's "Red Cavalry Tales," "Cloud, Lake, Tower" by Nabokov, sketches from Bunin, Zoshchenko, and Kharms--as well as less-anthologized works by well-known authors such as Sholokhov and Solzhenitsyn, and a sampling of contemporary authors like Pelevin, Petrushevskaya, and Ulitskaya. Some of the most exciting finds for me were stories by less-translated authors such as the poignant "Experience in Demonstrating Mourning" by Marina Vishnevetskaya and the breathtaking "The Last War Hero" by Oleg Ermakov, which demonstrate the continuing vitality of Russian literature in the post-Soviet period.

Although I enjoyed reading the collection tremendously (I read it all the way through, and then re-read the stories I'd selected for the class when they were assigned), my students did find the overall impact of the anthology to be rather downbeat. Although my response to that is "Welcome to Russian literature!" teachers may want to keep that in mind when assigning stories; even the comic authors such as Kharms were so much darker than what my poor American students were used to that the experience was more off-putting for them than anything. A more serious problem with the collection is the comparative dearth of female authors, who make up only about 10% of the authors surveyed. That, however, is more the fault of Russian literature, which for all its richness and diversity has always been heavily male-dominated, much more so than, say, English literature, than that of the anthologizers, who made a point of including not only established stars like Tolstaya and Petrushevskaya, but also Teffi, who is just now starting to be translated into English in a serious way, as well as the aforementioned Vishnevetskaya. All in all, an excellent teaching tool, and also a good choice for anyone wishing simply to acquaint themselves further with the different facets of 20th-century Russian literature.

[Daisy]

Want to read Andrei Sinyavsky's "Tenants" recommended by Juliana Geran Pilon in Notes from the Other Side of Night