5.0 out of 5 stars
New voices and new themes from an old place, July 6, 2010
This review is from: Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Paperback)
Rasskazy-defined as narratives, stories, tales
Edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker
Rasskazy is a collection of excerpts and short stories set throughout Russia, and provides a more positive depiction of Moscow than last week's Moscow Noir. This is completely different from other selections I've read from Russia, and much of it has a level of humor not always associated with Russian writing.
The "New Russia" is evident everywhere, as there isn't many references to the old Cold War struggles of poverty, crime, and brutality. They may make a brief appearance, but it certainly isn't a theme. These appear to be younger writers, creating a new and lighter style. In They Talk, an eavesdropper hears the secrets and silliness in other people's conversations: "...and until the dog kicks the bucket, you're not moving it from that apartment." Or, "...when he loved me, I wasn't jealous, and when he didn't love me-I was. I'd start calling, aggravating both myself and him, until one time an ambulance came for me." The little fragments of conversation are both poignant and funny. They could be heard anywhere, and that re-emphasizes the theme a "new Russia".
Another story, A Potential Customer, reveals what a young man gets out of his visit to an old friend: "I must tell others of my life, in order to see my reflection in their pupils." As he visits Moscow after an absence, he's waiting for his reappearance to be significant. He goes out and stands in the square. "I was prepared to be noticed, my plans had allowed for it as an integral part of my vacation, but Moscow sailed past....the depressing suspicion crept in that this time, as if out of spite, everything would be just as it had been a thousand times before....My native city would not recognize me."
Or the lonely blogger, in Have Mercy, Your Majesty Fish, who finds a mysterious commenter is the only one of many who understands her posts. His cryptic responses leave her hanging...
My favorite of the collection is Bregovich's Sixth Journey, by Oleg Zobern, about a professor who travels out of Moscow for some quiet space to work on papers. His drunken neighbor keeps a starving dog in the frozen yard. "One time I thought I saw barbed wire strung around his doghouse, with little guard towers standing around it. That would make the space between the house and the shed, where Ivan Denisovich's doghouse sits, into a little one-dog prison camp." The narrator feeds the dog, plays his music too loud, and tries to understand the Russian literature he assigns his students. "I find it hard to study this stuff because it's so close to me; it's where I live, in a way. The further back you go in the century, the simpler it is, everything's in its place....I divide the writers into the living and the dead and begin with the dead...The dead: they're like family to me already." In the end, the dog named after Solzhenitsyn's famous prisoner is released to roam free. An action that becomes symbolic of the Russian people in this new time as a whole.
The collection is huge, and would make a great selection for course adoption in a Russian history class.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Worthwhile, December 6, 2009
This review is from: Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Paperback)
This book was published in 2009 and contained 22 works by as many authors, the oldest of whom was just 40. The pieces were very recent, published between 2002 and 2009. There were 21 short stories and one excerpt from a novel.
The oldest writers were Dmitry Danilov (1969-), Ilya Kochergin (1970-) and Roman Senchin (1971-). The youngest were Nikolai Epikhin (1982-), Kirill Ryabov (1983-) and Evgeni Alyokhin (1985-). Others included Vladimir Kozlov (1972-), German Sadulaev (1973-), of Russian/Chechen background, who left Chechnya before fighting broke out but has written on the wars there, Linor Goralik (1975-) and Arkady Babchenko (1977-), whose writing incorporated his experiences in Chechnya. Of all the authors, eight were women.
The introduction noted that the writers in the collection were the first generation to spend their entire adult lives in the post-Soviet era. Many of these young authors had had works published in distinguished journals in Russia, and a number had won literary awards there.
As background to their writing, the introduction noted developments such as a concentration of government power, corruption and crackdowns on the media, together with rising living standards, an emergent middle class and the nation's resurgence as a global power. In addition, there were a free market and mass culture of low-brow TV and books that -- together with a government-subsidized film industry -- drowned out voices of opposition, to the extent that serious writing escaped heavy censorship, it was claimed. Debate on serious issues took place in a small number of newspapers and journals that were judged irrelevant by those in power and ignored.
Most of the works in the collection were described as "new Russian realism," which was contrasted with the more heavily surrealist/absurdist writing of older, better-known post-Soviet writers like Victor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin. Some of the works touched on behavior during the wars in Chechnya (Babchenko, Sadulaev, Prilepin), and one on current political developments (Senchin); Babchenko was especially critical of the wars and the way they were run: "Russia is a country of former inmates and our army lives by the same laws as a prison colony . . . The person with the authority is not the one who observes the laws, but he who breaks it." Most of the other writers, though, were concerned not with national events but with what personal life felt like in contemporary Russia (Alyokhin, Bezzubtsev-Kondakov, Boteva, Epikhin, Goralik, Klyuchareva, Kochergin, Snegirev, Zondberg). Some of the latter tended toward the bleak or absurd (Danilov, Kalinin, Ryabov, Starobinets), one toward magical realism (Klyuchareva), and a few toward the unintelligible or fantastic (Geide, Taratuta). There was much thinking and talking about love, companionship, disappointment and spirituality, amid drinking sessions and visits to apartments and dachas.
The stories enjoyed most were the first, by Goralik, which presented a number of voices as if overheard on a street in Moscow. The one by Snegirev, in which a man tried to decide how he felt about having a baby with his girlfriend, changing his mind according to how people treated him in the course of his day. The one by Kozlov -- which unlike many was short and to the point -- about an event from Soviet schooldays, told with black humor. And the one by Sadulaev, where the writer looked back on the people and places of his village in Chechnya that had been destroyed. The piece by Babchenko was also interesting for its depiction of the brutality of the wars, though some of his writing published elsewhere had seemed even more striking ("Argun" in GLAS issue No. 40, War & Peace, in 2006).
Stylistically, the most interesting for this reader were one by Maria Boteva, approaching stream of consciousness, in which a narrator discussed a woman who'd been disappointed in love and entered a monastery; was she to be pitied or admired? And Goralik's piece that captured voices on the street.
Most of the stories appeared to be set in the near present, except for Kozlov's, which took place in Soviet times. Several of the pieces incorporated mobile phones, blogs, userpics, MP3 players, Wikipedia and Google, the computer game Civilization, the foreign custom of Halloween and a comic film by Kevin Smith. Other works mentioned the Apocalypse, John the Baptist and the disciples of Christ.
I finished the collection feeling that I'd gotten some glimpses of contemporary life in Russia and the brutality of operations in Chechnya, but that fewer of the pieces than expected had impressed with their excellence as stories. Especially when compared with the best short works of predecessors like Leskov, Chekhov, Bunin, Romanov, Babel, Bulgakov, Zoshchenko, Platonov, Kharms, Shalamov and Kazakov.
Another recent collection of contemporary writing is Life Stories: Original Works by Russian Writers (2009).
Some excerpts:
"Many of the workers at the Hammer and Sickle factory became alcoholics and died of alcoholism or other circumstances. Others did not become alcoholics and did not die. Still others did not become alcoholics, but died. And there are those who became alcoholics but have not yet died. They still live in these buildings that were built in the sixties for the workers at the Hammer and Sickle factory, those who drank heavily, those who died, and those who kept on living."
"'Ivanov, take sentry duty.' 'I can't, sir, I've got no fingers.' 'Damn . . . Petrov, take sentry duty.' 'Can't sir, my knees are shot through.'"
"You could not assemble a complete person from my mother and me at that point. Of all the many attributes of the human spirit, we had only managed to retain the half that no longer believes in anything, wants nothing and hopes for nothing. We each had the same half person."
"Understand nowadays people become friends, get married, and so on, on the basis of [materialistic] equality and not the kinship of spirit."
"For whom am I writing this book? Nobody will read it, nobody could understand it. Nobody will accept it. On either side of the line of fire. Nobody needs a book like this, it's not limited to either system of propaganda . . . . This book can't even offer the sophisticated youth any postmodernism . . . . The living don't need my book. The dead do."
"This is the most important moment, there is nothing better, and there never will be. It's like I look at a drop and see the ocean, this eternity that cannot be contained."
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