Russian Fiction, 20th Century (September 2010 Read!)

Folks,
I am going to use this topic/thread to post a series of notes and reviews over the course of the next year to provide a 'rich, thick stew' of reviews, articles, notes, and hopefully discourse toward a richer reading experience for all of you who want to get the most out of your September 2010 Reading Theme of Russia 20th Century Fiction. September 2010 too far away you say? Bah. Besides, the average lengths of these books are a bit higher. And I have identified 14,200 pages across 35 books that represents - arguably - the canon for this region and time period for novel-length fiction. Keep your eyes out.

Thanks
Shawn

>1 shawnd:, wow, shawn, I like a man who plans ahead! I'll be watching this thread closely!

Review
Nervous People, and Other Satires is the most popular compilation of pieces by Russian author Mikhail Zoschenko.

Zoshchenko was a Russian satirist writing during the Stalinist period in the USSR. His most published pieces were newspaper entries, sort of humorous op-eds, structurally perhaps similar to the the American syndicated newspaper humorist Dave Barry and the American humorist/folktale teller Garrison Keillor (but more elegant--imagine crossing those authors with Bunin and Kafka and then make it almost as funny as Steve Martin). Zoshchenko's pieces in Nervous People are a lot of the same ones in the more recently translated and published The Galosh but this version seems a little more upbeat and less depressing. The book includes a detailed Introduction as well as a piece at the end which is not a short satire but rather an autobiographical essay/musing on how Zoshchenko became depressed and a search through his childhood events. It is a telling and welcome twist in a different direction after many many stories about city life during the 20's, 30's, and 40's in Russia among the middle and lower class. The book also fits in a couple of true short stories before the newspaper pieces. At times laugh out loud funny most of it is in a signature style which is ironic, wistful, a little funny, with a life message that insists on persistence and ignoring the futility of trying to get ahead while the path gets harder.

The average rating of this book in LT is 4 right now, I rated it a 3 relative to all my books, however it's piercing blows and humor and subject matter make it absolutely required reading for understanding both Soviet life and Russian 20th Century lit.

I have read absolutely no Russian authors, ever. I look forward to your preparation for next Sept's read. Thank you very much for doing all the prep work for us.

>4 catarina1: - super! I hope you have a great first experience so Russian Lit becomes part of your lifelong reading passion...

Shawn, are you going to keep this theme strictly to Russia proper or also include the republics of the Soviet Union?

And can we include Brodsky and Nabokov?

This will be an excuse to read one of my very favorite novels, Doctor Zhivago for the umpteenth time... (from which my 2nd daughter got her name...) And I can dust off my Pasternak collection!

I have an anthology of 20th century Russian short fiction in my library - The Portable Twentieth Century Russian Reader published by Penguin. I read this in the 90s and remember enjoying it.

>6 avaland: My hope is that we can be inclusive of countries. One of the things I learned participating in the Reading Globally Challenge is that it becomes more of a definitional exercise to decide 'If I have a Ukrainian writer who was schooled in Ukraine and went to Russia and wrote a novel set in Russia, is it Russian or Ukrainian? I'd rather not get into all that. And since (with our avid voting!) we may not ever get to an Azerbaijan month, let's include them - and the folks who want to focus just on Russia can. Unfortunately, we're challenged by a translation issue, so we're not plagued with possibility: there aren't so many works from the various republics that threaten to steal 'share' from Russia proper.

In keeping with this thinking vis a vis the geography dimension, then emigres are 'in' at least for me, no reason someone can't ignore them themselves. I personally consider Nabokov French, he writes like the French, and will do my best to say as little as I can about him since I don't personally like his writing style but I am in the extreme minority. I am committed to reading at least one of the novels he wrote in Russian for this exercise and will be looking to find only positives! (you can find the list on Wikipedia of which he wrote in French vs. Russian)

The lack of number of novels is surprising to me - I suspect there are less than sixty different Russian (this time I use the country specifically) novels from the 20th century in English purchase-able new (e.g. via Amazon). I would have bet the number was 200 or so.

I myself will focus on fiction novels. I hope folks feel free to read poetry, but I won't be able to comment on it, so maybe so poetry lovers out there can carry that load. I hope some folks do, because there is a dearth of women writers in Russia in this period, and Anna Akhmatova is so important to understand Russia this past century. All that said, you won't see her or Brodsky or others from me.

This also brings up the question of short stories. Someone could probably do a masters degree not only on Short Stories and their place in Russian writing, but one about the relationship between short stories and novels. I won't go there in this post lest I start naming authors and works... The net is that there are probably as many pages or more of short stories than novels, and I am going to focus on novels -- unless that author wrote no full length works. So I personally would include Babel (no full length works) and Zoschenko for me. This is mostly a decision so I can reduce scope. I feel like I can help the group more by ignoring stories, although, for example, I much prefer the short stories of Zamyatin to his book 'We', and think that, especially in Russia vs. the West, that the technical writing quality in short stories is often much better than in novels by the same author or in general (almost to reach absolute perfection, see Gogol). But if a few folks out there went nuts with Kharms and Ilf and Petrov and did stories then that would help all of us.

I'm already loving this thread and learning so much - thanks! I tend to choose my next book depending on my mood, so having this here way before next September means I should actually get my act together and read something!

You might have seen this in stores, I know it's on one of the center tables at Barnes and Nobles these days (Oct 2009) - The First Circle by Solzhenitsyn. This is the first time his uncut edition of this book has been available in English. This translation was reviewed by Solzhenitsyn not long before he died in fact. Details below. I'm in the middle of it and having not read the original can't say much about the newly revealed content that he had cut to avoid censorship, nor about the translation, other than it is clearly Solzhenitsyn and wonderful in that realm.

Here's an article that is from over a year ago when it first became public that this would be released. It actually hit the shelves in Oct 2009:

Solzhenitsyn's First Circle' coming out uncut
By Hillel Italie | ASSOCIATED PRESS

Thursday, July 24, 2008
Story last updated at 7/24/2008 - 1:13 am

NEW YORK - An uncut edition of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle," a highly praised and controversial novel published 40 years ago and heavily edited because of its story of a Soviet prison camp, is finally coming out in English.

" The First Circle' is one of the most important novels of the 20th century and we are thrilled to be making this masterpiece available in its full glory," Carrie Kania, senior vice president and publisher of Harper Perennial, said Tuesday in a statement.

Harper Perennial, a paperback imprint of HarperCollins, will release "The First Circle" in 2009. The 89-year-old Solzhenitsyn, winner in 1970 of the Nobel Prize for literature, returned to his homeland in the 1990s after two decades in exile and now lives in Moscow.

The novel, completed in 1964 and banned by Soviet officials even after Solzhenitsyn cut nine chapters, is set in a gulag where scientists and scholars have been sent for alleged subversion against the Stalinist regime. A shortened, 580-page version of "The First Circle" came out in English in 1968 - the text had mysteriously been leaked out of the Soviet Union - despite objections by the author, who believed his work was being exploited for profit, and by scholars who feared that the book's release could jeopardize his safety.

Solzhenitsyn's struggles - at one point, the manuscript of his novel was seized by the KGB - set off an extended Cold War debate and assured "The First Circle" a welcome reception in the United States. The Book-of-the-Month Club made it a featured selection and the announced first printing was 200,000.

New York Times reviewer Thomas Lask called the book "at once classic and contemporary. Reading it, we know that it has been with us for years, just as we know future generations will read it with wonder and awe."

The full edition has long been available in Russian; mortality, not censorship, helped delay its U.S. release.

According to Harper Perennial editor Peter Hubbard, Solzhenitsyn approved a new English text a few years ago and commissioned his favorite translator, Harry T. Willetts, who had worked on Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago." But Willetts died in 2005, not long after completing the translation, and the publisher "went through some edits with Solzhenitsyn. It took a little time for the book to make its way to us," Hubbard told The Associated Press.

Imprisoned in his 20s for alleged anti-Soviet crimes, Solzhenitsyn became famous worldwide in 1962 with "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," a short novel set in a Siberian labor camp and at the time a shockingly blunt attack against the Soviet system. Then-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev approved the book's release, but he was ousted in 1964, censorship tightened and Solzhenitsyn's work was suppressed for years.

Most Important Works of 20th Century Russia/Soviet Bloc

Here is a list of what I think the most 'important' 20th Century Russian novels are. I think everyone would make a different list, and it was a bit hard to limit it (but not that hard) to 35 books. After the list is a series of caveats for anyone wondering how I came up with this.

I welcome your comments at whatever volume! These are by no means my favorites and I have read only a sample of these, although have been reading from them for 20 years. I know I missed something - let me know.

Now you can get started early on your September 2010 read!

These are in priority order, meaning in my opinion, #1 is more 'important' than #2, etc.

1. Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn, 1973
2. Dr. Zhivago, Pasternak, 1957
3. Petersburg, Bely, 1913
4. Master & Margarita, Bulgakov, 1935
5. Nervous People and Other Satires, Zoschenko, 1950
6. We, Zamyatin, 1925
7. A Day in the Life of Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn, 1962
8. Quiet Flows the Don, Sholokhov, 1945
9. Life and Fate, Grossman, 1960
10. Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov, 1936
11. Life of Insects, Pelevin, 1993
12. Funeral Party, Ulitskaya, 1997
13. Mother, Gorky, 1907
14. Foundation Pit, Platonov, 1932
15. Life & Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Voinovich, 1975
16. Red Cavalry, Babel, 1944
17. The Village, Bunin, 1910
18. Heart of a Dog, Bulgakov, 1925
19. Petty Demon, Sologub, 1902
20. Cancer Ward, Solzhenitsyn, 1968
21. Pushkin House, Bitov, 1978
22. School for Fools, Sokolov, 1988
23. Yama, The Pit, Kuprin, 1915
24. Russian Beauty, Erofeyev, 1979
25. Cities and Years, Fedin, 1924
26. The Slynx, Tolstaya, 1998
27. The Time: Night, Petrushevskaya, 1992
28. Envy, Olesha, 1927
29. Generations of Winter, Aksyonov, 1992
30. Compromise, Dovlatov, 1990
31. Two Captains, Kaverin, 1950
32. Fifth Seal, Aldanov, 1943
33. Faculty of Useless Knowledge, Dombrovsky, 1978
34. Yawning Heights, Zinoviev, 1976
35. Sofia Petrovna, Chukovskaya, 1944

a) This includes works by authors who have been born outside Russia proper; the books may have been set there, etc. but one can make an argument they are Russian
b) This does not include poetry nor non-fiction
c) This attempts to not include story compilations. There is a rich tradition, perhaps better and richer than in other countries, of stories. Technically superior in some cases to the novels by the same author. However, the stories out there are so broad, and there are so many different compilations with the same stories, different translations, etc, that it was easier - and I think in keeping with the idea of having a theme read where others can read the same thing and have a dialogue! - to keep these out. Please note Babel does not really have a full length novel that is available in English, maybe none in Russian, however he is included and you can post a comment to me and I'll explain why.
d) This list lives on its own, meaning if a book ranked #9 covers specific aspects of Russian lit in this period, then there may be a book that's worse in many ways than #10, but better than #20, but it won't be on the list at all, because the book in the #9 slot accomplished that. Otherwise the list would just be a top 35 technically well written and I want my list to include something from the Serapion movement, something from every era, something that deals with neo-Realism, etc. etc.
e) I suspect folks will think I have slighted Nabokov. I think he's a French writer more than Russian in a number of ways, and so be it, I'd rather make the list slightly controversial than not right in my experience.
f) I could provide more details, but who cares...jump in and read

Just finished the recently release uncensored complete edition of In the First Circle and here's my review before I am on to shorter(!) books from the latter part of the 20th century more readable in a month for Sept 2010.

**

A 2009 first release of an uncensored complete version of this Solzhenitsyn novel. The introduction's first sentence: "It has taken half a century for English-language readers to receive the definitive text of the best novel by the man who well may be the most famous author of our times." I wouldn't say it's his best novel, but it is broad while holding to a storyline that keeps a reader engaged--and is clearly Solzhenitsyn all the way.

The 730+ page book is titled after the least oppressive circle of Dante's Inferno, and indeed portrays the most lax and easy of the Soviet Union's prison camps. Populated with jailed scientists tasked with inventing new technologies to aid the governments arms and espionage race with the West, the prison includes none of the traditional death-inducing grueling conditions of most of the camps, and a reader should not take away the conditions herein as reflective of the experience of the 5-20 million Russians jailed in prison camps/work camps throughout the 20th century.

The book follows a novel with a concrete plot, but covers a broad range of topics from philosophy including Epicureanism and Dialectic Materialism, to moral commitments/dilemmas, to religion and government. It strays at times to ensure portrayal of everyone from Stalin himself including his thoughts to a lowly peasant living in the country-side reminiscing of the 19th century ways of living under Tsarist rule.

Centering this breadth is a story of one Volodin, state diplomat, who finds himself in possession of a state secret that - if communicated to the West in time - could prevent or delay the USSR in developing nuclear weapons and thus presumably save millions of lives potentially lost in a nuclear conflict. The author toggles back and forth between the State's race to identify the anonymous informant and between a cast of intellectual engineer prisoners led by Gleb Nerzhin, a youngish outdoorsy moral martyr of sorts struggling with his wife's continued lack of means, status, and future, and Lev Rubin, the lead character of prisoners if there is one, a dedicated Marxist, gifted scientist and comedian who ultimately decides Volodin's fate.

While the book could use editing, there's no clear way to delete any more than 20 pages or so without carving out the fifty or more points and dilemmas Solzhenitsyn leaves with the reader. A hard, slow read with little pace, the book is a realistic portrayal of perhaps every issue facing the Gulag inhabitant with the least struggles.

**

Headline from front page of Wikipedia, 11/18/09 was this entry re Nabokov:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Original_of_Laura

and more description information here from 11/6/09:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iBxjF8uCw6NIn9hlD_8tEsKhlALA

Short version: Nabokov's incomplete novel on which he was working when he died has been published.

If I might add:

Anatoli Rybakov--a Ukranian--his Children of the Arbat is centered around Moscow during the 30's and was followed up by another novel 'Fear'. They are both excellent--much in the same vein as Aksyonov's 'Generations of winter'. He is particularly good at the historical epic type novel--a Russian strength.

Sergei Dovlatov has been translated a few times. I particularly like 'The suitcase' and 'Ours' both set in post Stalin era Russia.

Erofeev's Moscow to the end of the line is a very interesting satire set in the same post Stalin era.

Yuri Buida's The zero train is an allegorical satire-- set around a station and the one monthly train that passes through on its way to the northern labor camps.

>13 lriley: thanks lriley! I missed these and will have them in future lists.

Although written in 2000 (one year late?), I am including this review as an idea for the September 2010 20th Century Russian Literature monthly theme. Written by Tatyana Tolstaya (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatyana_Tolstaya), the book can be a fast read and stands up as both a novel and a commentary on Soviet/authoritarian governments.

The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya

A fun, wry, touching and troubled allegory of the seemingly inevitable gravity toward Russians being governed by authoritarian states. The novel follows the life story of Benedikt, an ordinary citizen of a futuristic post-apocalyptic land that once was Moscow. The authoress' refreshing writing male characters is almost pitch-perfect and an upbeat tone accompanies Benedikt's career and romance in a pre-agricultural land where mice make up the primary food staple. Benedikt finds himself caught in the juxtaposition of living with his rich in-laws and his peasant friends. As the drama progresses, the characters become more and more 'themselves' individually and in the aggregate, with more and more tragic consequences.

Messages 10 & 13 both mention Sergei Dovlatov. I've just heard a short story of his on the New Yorker fiction podcast. It's great - I will certainly be looking for more of his stuff.

I read The Invisible Book by Dovlatov. Its a weird little thing, written as an epilogue to a larger book that he was struggling to get past the censors. Eventually he gave up with the big book, and just published the epilogue. It is both funny and angry, and more than a little weird.

My first Russian work of the year is an unintentionally non-fiction work due to an almost fantastical struggle between an up-and-coming Russian writer and a censor, over, of all things, and apartment. The book is

The Ivankiad by Vladimir Voinovich.

This is a non-fiction memoir of sorts that takes place over the course of less than a year in Moscow, Russia. The title, the Ivankiad, is most likely a concatenation of the name of the nemesis of the main character, one Sergei Ivanko, and 'jeremiad' which is defined as a literary work expressing a bitter lament. The author, Vladimir Voinovich, fresh off circumventing the censoring of his best novel by ensuring a copy makes its way to the West, ends up in an unexpected struggle with a competitor for an apartment. The apartment building is a cooperative dedicated to housing writers (although others related to the writing trade have made it in) and on Voinovich's side, he was promised the apartment. On Ivanko's side is that he is highly connected in the Communist Party with powerful officials, and he is the final say on what gets published in some cases of fiction works.

The book is a satire and mostly well written, and spares us most of the 'bitter lamentation' the author likely really felt. The allocation of apartments in Communist Moscow--and other cities--has been well publicized and anguished over for decades in Russian fiction. Unlike an open market based on supply, demand, and income in the West, apportioning apartments in Moscow is a mix of board rules, ties to the Communist hierarchy and other influence, politicking, votes, and other angles. The book takes subtle shots at a number of values, such as unwillingness to act on principle for fear of losing some right (such as getting published), greed, dishonesty, and others. While there are some helpful comments, on the whole the book is more like a written version of a three-hour verbal account of an amazing story in the life of someone not willing to do whatever the Communist Party says to do.

Apologies, posted this in another thread when it should have been here...

In the process of conversing with members about the September 2010 read topic of 20th Century Russian Fiction, members brought up an author that did make my list, Sergei Dovlatov, as being an important 20th century contemporary author. I expedited my read and here is a review. Certainly a worthy small work that paints the contemporary young middle class struggles in the USSR of the 70's and early 80's that are likely relevant today.

The Compromise, by Sergei Dovlatov

This is a well-written, sharp set of anecdotes which sometimes strays into trite or tired subjects in the life of an Estonian journalist. Written in the first person, the author writes about a series of 'Compromises' of various types or another that he has to make in his life, relationships, and mostly his journalistic output due to the ironic rules of the State in the USSR. Touching loosely and irreverently on topics such as alcoholism, bureaucracy, and struggle against poverty, the book is compact and readable. At times enchanting, the reader may find themselves being frustrated that a writer with this skill is writing interesting and at times irreverent anecdotes rather than a masterwork of fiction.

Another book by Sergei Dovlatov, just finished, reviewed here...

The Suitcase by Sergei Dovlatov

If Dovlatov was a worse writer and the plot less interesting, this might be considered a dry, ham-handed approach to a memoir. However, Dovlatov, a master of presentation, provides a wonderful approach to placing before the reader a series of vignettes of his life in Russia before he emigrated. He opens the one suitcase he brought to the West many years-it was never opened-and relives how he came to possess each item. The stories blend from black market socks to conniving the Communist State into buying him a black suit, and on to other items.

While Dovlatov makes merry with vodka aplenty, there is an undercurrent of struggle and hopelessness not only at the bureaucracy, corruption, grandstanding, and moral turpitude of life under Communism, but also within the author's own life, hinting at times at some greater expectations never fulfilled. Dovlatov's true-to-life account and wonderful characters make it easy to not be too touched by the regrets the book weaves in among the funny and sad stories.

Here's a book to consider for September, but if you do, please start it soon! The 850 page Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. I was very impressed with this book, and would definitely put it in the top 5 best Russian 20th century fiction. Review here:

This Russian war novel is so well written, the pure prose, that one could ignore the effort of memorizing the many characters and just focus on sentence, tone, relationships, plot, structure, words. The book does have some length, but if you fall in love with the prose it could just as well be 1700 pages instead of 863. So many threads are left alive at book's end...what of young Nadya and her lieutenant? Will her father survive being a Jew and outlast Stalin? Would Victor ever see Marya again? How would Krymov fare in the camps? It takes place in an incredibly short period of time but deep with implication, energy, action, betrayal, love, and politics. It is perhaps the iconic 20th century Russian novel.

Is it like War and Peace? Yes. Is it a rehash of War and Peace? No. Life and Fate has a closer relationship to 19th century Russian novels sharing the selfsame job of delicately handling Stalin and the regime by other authors of that day, and touching on topics of denunciations, allocated living spaces, arrests, Lubyanka, work camps, the Jewish issue, and more. Many Russian novels have many characters with interlocking plots moving back and forth, and to bucket it with Tolstoy doesn't take into account the broader spectrum of a rich mix of authors and eras that make it more nuanced to compare books written more than 50 years apart.

Life and Fate is one of my favorite books of all time, and I recommend Everything Flows by Grossman also. While much shorter than L&F, and in some ways less novel-ish, it attempts to capture all the evils of the Stalinist era.

September is right around the corner! Hopefully I can get a few more reviews off in advance. This one relates more to America vs. Soviet differences:

In Search of Melancholy Baby

This travelogue/memoir starts out strong and hits a wall around page 120. From then on, the book sinks into discussions (rants?) about feminism, racism, and other sentiments. Written in the first person, Aksyonov refers to his initial trip to the US, it's effect on his Soviet citizenship and work, and walks the reader through his emigration to the US. Traveling with his wife, the first hundred pages paint a funny and real picture of America, how Americans consider Russians everywhere from a Texas diner to a Washington DC dinner party. There are great stories and jabs at Communism. Written before the fall of Communism, and when the Soviet State still existing, the references to the State are easily ignored as the truths are timeless. Only slightly narcissistic, the author is happy to poke fun at himself at other times. A wonderful work before it groans away from interesting stories and into fluff.

In trying to knock down a couple of more contemporary novels, I came across this written-in-1976 fiction by Erofeyev called Moscow to the End of the Line. Not a suggestion for most for the September read, except for someone that might have a particular interest in the role of alcohol in modern Russia (pre-fall):

Moscow to the End of the Line

A slow reading novel with very little plot, led by an alcoholic protagonist. The chapters are different legs between stations as the main character rides a train outward from Moscow to the farthest station. The book begins with a solid mix of humor and portraying the abstruse and depressing realism of alcoholism pervasive in modern Russian society. The story of the main character in his work life is especially ironic. However, compared to other Russian novels, the social commentary herein is very tame and along that spectrum this can hardly be said to be a strong political commentary--although if the government is indicted it might be for sustaining a society where virtually everyone from train conductor to Communist Party regulator is a daily drunk. As the book progressing humor dries up, the rants and delusions and re-telling dreams increase. A small coterie of fellow travelers occurs without much effect. As the book tails out, the ramblings might be pitch perfect, but pitch perfect for an unemployed, dirty, inebriated, likely somewhat mentally ill man who has lost all activity in the judgment part of his brain is not a compelling read when the author has decided to provide no structure around it rather than the stream-of-consciousness of an almost unconscious man.

-->25 shawnd:
I read this a couple of years ago, and absolutely loved it. I like a bit of 'booze lit', and think that the best of it encapsulates the absurdity and beauty of the human spirit, especially when it is absolutely blotto. For me, Erofeev does this as well as anyone I have ever read. Like all 'booze lit' it is extremely self-indulgent, but I didn't find that too problematic. I agree with Shawnd's use of the world 'rambling' though. it isn't what you would call focused.

I read Cancer Ward not long after it came out in paperback (I was in high school) and liked it a lot. I read it again about 6 years ago and loved it. It's sort of an old-fashioned, sprawling Russian novel in form, and even though it was very much about Communism, I didn't feel like the fall of the USSR made it even a little bit "obsolete".

Just a suggestion to add to the several fine ones in this thread, if someone wants to read a boat anchor.

>23 rebeccanyc:
I remember reading an earlier translation of Everything Flows, called Forever Flowing, and being very moved by it. I never could reread it, though, and I'm not sure why.

I'm planning on reading Forever Flowing. I loved Life and Fate and since I borrowed FF nearly a year ago I should probably read and return it. It's much shorter than L&F and I hope it is just as good.

>28 technodiabla: welcome to LT global reading group technodiabla!

We're getting close to September 2010, whose theme is 20th Century Russia! Exciting!!
There will be one more last review of a potential book to select for your Russia read. In retrospect, all the books I reviewed are a mash of perhaps b-listers with a couple of A's, by no means recommendations. As we get a bit closer I will make some recommendations.

Next I'll attempt to put together some commentary on the eras/segments of 20th century Russian literature in aggregate, and preview some of the issues/themes one might come across during their Russia read.

Note- Russian literature in the last century has absolutely stunning examples of prose and story and above all, unique messages for a world audience about humanity and spirit that should color any non-Russian literature from the same period!

The Embezzlers by Valentin Kataev

Chief accountant Philip Prohoroff and his cashier (sort of a junior accountant/treasurer) Young Ivan are in the midst of getting cash payroll for their workers when Prohoroff gets persuaded to play the 'big shot' at a local saloon. Unfortunately, Ivan and his senior are at a unique time in the transition to Communism where there is some lack of control over State funds, and a rash of officials have absconded with payroll cash. Ivan's admiration for his boss and his lack of bravery, combined with Philip's fanciful self-image, cowardice, and fear of his wife and of looking bad to Ivan lead to mutual destruction as they end up being bullied and sucked into a lark that eats up what might be close to $200,000 USD (?) in today's currency.

The book is, unfortunately, pitch perfect, and we see a cast of enablers, gold diggers, scam artists, bullying wives, and regular folk all combine to make Ivan and Philip begin to notice their lack of criminal mind, intelligence, plan and potential. A lyrical and all-too-sad embodiment of 'a fool and his gold...'

You have been doing an amazing job here preparing and preparing us for the theme read. I am really torn about whether to read things I already have on my TBR, such as Petersburg by Andrey Bely, Soul, and Other Stories by Andrei Platonov, and The Master and Margarita, to read authors I should read but never have, like Solzhenitsyn, to read authors I know I like, like Isaac Babel, or to read something really contemporary. I know I could just devote the month to this, but there are just too many other books I want to read . . .

Hi, This is my first post in this thread. It's a review of Vladimir Voinovich's "The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin". You may get the impression I liked this book.

--------------------------------------
Private Ivan Chonkin is a soldier in the Soviet army. This novel starts in 1941, just before Germany attacked the Soviet Union. We find Private Chonkin to be an innocent and apparently weak minded individual who finds it difficult to do what is expected of him in the armed forces, and is therefore given menial tasks, is in constant trouble, and is very familiar with punishment duties.
A Soviet aircraft gets into mechanical difficulty and has to make a forced landing beside the rural village of Krasnoye, terrifying the local residents. Chonkin is equipped with a week’s supply of rations and flown over to Krasnoye where he takes up a lonely vigil guarding the crippled plane in a field beside Krasnoye.
Chonkin is forgotten by his unit and the novel tells the story of how he interacts with the local villagers while he sticks to his orders and guards the plane.
We are treated to droll Russian humour which includes misunderstandings, bureaucratic idiocy, internal Communist party politics, blatant bullying, digressions into trivia, organisational paranoia, and everything else one would expect from a huge, bureaucratic enterprise. This includes the chairman of the local kolkhoz, who is constantly being told by his superiors that he is under constant surveillance, believing Chonkin has been planted in the village for the sole purpose of spying on him.
I don’t usually describe so much of the content of a novel in a review, but the details above are giving nothing away. I could tell you the whole plot and how the novel ends without taking away the pleasure you will have reading it for yourself. This book was a re-read for me, something I never do, but I still enjoyed the book enormously.
Voinovich created an atmosphere and I just enjoyed living in it. He created characters that make you cringe with their actions, but he explains the logic they work to and this makes it all plausible and understandable.
Voinovich wrote this book between 1963 and 1970. It was not appreciated by the Soviet authorities and by 1980 he was forced to emigrate from the USSR. He was subsequently rehabilitated in 1990, even receiving an award from President Putin, who, while in his KGB days, was probably on the side of the people who forced him to emigrate in the first place.
Voinovich’s work is full of droll humour and constantly pokes fun at the stupidity of situations caused by political environment and centralised power. I found Ivan Chonkin to be not just about Soviet culture and the operation of a Communist state, but to also contain stories that could easily reflect events in some large organisations that operate anywhere in the world. I know I have seen things happen that could easily have taken place in Krasnoye.
I enjoyed The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and was delighted to read it a second time. Why did I read it a second time? Because I only recently discovered there is a sequel and I wanted to remind myself of the detail before starting it; “Pretender to the Throne: The Further Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin”.

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Just checking into the thread....looks wonderful!

I'll be reading Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko (first of a 4-book series). These books came to my attention last year and 2 films covering parts 1-3 of book 1 have been made into movies (which I have but haven't watched yet). From Wiki: Lukyanenko is a science fiction and fantasy author, writing in Russian, and is arguably the most popular contemporary Russian sci-fi writer.

I wanted to mention a book I read earlier this year that would fit this challenge, although I did not really enjoy it: 2017 by Olga Slavnikova. Here is the review I posted after I read it.

I almost put this novel down many times, despite my high hopes for it. Set in 2017, 100 years after the Russian Revolution, it won the "Russian Booker" prize and was translated by one of the most noted Russian translators, Marian Schwartz. I wish I liked it better. The themes of the destruction of the natural environment, the "inauthenticity" and greed of post-Soviet Russia, and the lack of a sense of history are all fascinating, but the plot is hard to follow, the mixture of reality, myth, and science fiction not to my taste, the writing dense and often overloaded with adjectives and analogies, and the characterizations not psychologically believable. The parts I most enjoyed were the depictions of the vastness, beauty and wildness of the Russian landscape, something that links Slavnikova to earlier Russian authors.

#36
I had been thinking of buying 2017, so I will hold back now. Thank you for the preview. I have plenty of other Russian books to read that I expect to be good.

I forgot about this challenge, but I have a few books from the list in post #10, so I might just participate after all. (Posting this so the thread will pop up and remind me).

Here's my review of 2017 in case anyone is interested (I got a copy through LT Early Reviewers a few months ago)......
"I am glad I finished this book. I enjoyed it immensely though it very difficult to get through the first chapter. The language there is overloaded with analogies that are overly conspicuous to the point of being a distraction. After that it seemed the author forgot about trying so hard to write, relaxed and wrote the rest of the story-- which is imaginative, complex, and vivid.

I really enjoyed the blending of myth, sci-fi, romance, and adventure. I'll admit that there were aspects of these that were just touched on, and then not followed up on very clearly-- so you'll have to fill in some blanks with your own imagination. The characters are almost archetypal in nature; they are clearly under the control of fate and destiny-- a strong theme of the novel. The characterization lends itself well to the authenticity theme of the novel as well (none of them are authentic-- they are universal puppets).

The Riphean mountain area is beautifully imagined and vividly created for the reader (my favorite part of the book). It is contrasted sharply with the city-- which was equally vividly described as dull, dreary, even rotten.

The sci-fi gadgetry was somewhat ridiculous-- and very uneven given the lack of other technology that does actually exist but seemed not to in the novel. I don't think it was necessary to the plot and could have been omitted.

Overall I thought it was an unusual & totally original book with writing that ranged from awful to genius (not sure how much the translation played a role here). It was a challenging read, and even now that I've finished it I don't completely understand the political aspects of it (possibly due to my 0-knowledge of modern day Russia). I would recommend this book to anyone who is patient enough to take in it's complexities and is tired of the lightweight formulaic novels that American writers are churning out these days. 4 stars "

A reading theme to consider...Russian 20th Century starts in 3 days!!!

Housing under Soviet Communism

One of the themes that is repeatedly found in 20th century Russian lit is about the housing situation of the novel participants. This is less so for books set in rural environments. But for books which wholly or in part take place in cities, there is a consistent thread around the allotment of rooms and living situation of the characters. Housing demand was high and supply low, and since persons could not pay for private property, housing was specified by the State.

Wikipedia says:

As in most cities there were few new housing units which were built, a severe shortage of housing units soon became apparent. All communist countries adopted the solution which had been applied by the soviets after the 1917 revolution. Strict limits were set on the area to which each person was entitled and the authorities would place people who needed housing in the exceeding rooms. Generally the area allocated to which a person was entitled was about 9-10 square meters (100 sq ft.) and more than one person had to share the same room. There was no area allocated to living and dining areas. Four or more families had to share the same apartments. The industrialization brought more people from the rural areas to the cities and gradually, even it became impossible to house more people in the cities without starting an extensive program of new constructions. end Wikipedia

This comes up in humorous places in a number of novels, or as a method to describe either the connections one had to Communist officials, or how one was moving up or down in the informal hierarchy. Detailed descriptions of the rooms allotted to the chief character of Heart of a Dog I remember well. In some novels, we are shocked not only at the odd and annoying people the characters are foisted into living with, but worse, the small amounts of personal space, sometimes closed off with curtains.

Here is a link to a blog posting that gives an example of the apartment set ups common in that era: http://is.gd/eJKw7

I'd encourage us in reading Russia in 20th century to keep an eye out - for books set in the Communist era - more focus paid to the allotted room(s) for living for the characters, what this means about their relation to each other and the State, and the likely mindset and actions of those characters as a result.

#40 Housing under Soviet Communism

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin includes a great parody on allotted housing. All the apartments are glass; the walls, the ceilings, the floors; everything. It deters anti-social behaviour. No hiding place.

Probably a stupid question, but it's been so long since I've participated I just don't know anymore: does the book have to be written by a Russion author or can it be any book set in Russia during the 20th century?

>42 Samantha_kathy:, no rules! all inclusive...

I try to use books I already have in my huge TBR. I decided I'd use A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich . I'm hoping it will be small but mighty.

I haven't participated in the monthly theme reads here, but I thought I would give it a try. However, the books I read, if not already owned, I get from my local library system. I have just found out that we have very little Russian literature. This is probably mostly because this library system (for which I work!) in fiction focuses on popular reading. However, I have located one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, so I will also give it a try.

Thanks for all the work putting this list together.

I am also going to start with A Day in the LIfe of Ivan Denisovich, primarily because I am embarrassed I have never read it, and secondarily since it is short (since I am also reading an appropriate nonfiction tome, Hitler and Stalin), but I do hope to read something more contemporary later in the month.

I am going to read The Master and Margarita By Mikhail Bulgakov. I know it's a classic, and I've had it in my library for the longest. Might as well use this motivating theme read to dive into this book!

Exciting exciting!!! It's finally here...
If anyone needs a book and they can't find one, just let me know what you want and I'll send you a copy (unless it's an unabridged 1st edition Solzenitsyn Gulag Archipelago...which I'm not even sure one could find)...

The link below is to a syllabus from University from State University of New York - Albany. The course is on 20th Century Russian Literature. It includes names of critical works about the period, names of books the professor thought worthy to include, and more.

http://www.albany.edu/~hh476533/pdf/ARUS252.pdf

I am going to try to read The Zero-Train by Yuri Buida as it combines the country with a railroad motif.

If anyone is looking for more ideas for contemporary Russian Literature, Bookmarks Magazine (Sept./Oct.) has a 6-page article on it. I added many of the books to my wishlist.

Well, I found I couldn't face A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich right now, as I'm also reading Hitler and Stalin, so I've started The Master and Margarita, which I've been meaning to read for years.

Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman. I had it in my TBR pile for about a year now, so this thread was my opportunity to actually get through it - and I followed shawnd's advice to start early!

In my opinion a definite classic. A fascinating tapestry of life in Soviet Russia in 1942-3. Although the battle of Stalingrad appears to be the central event of the book, I think it is the totalitarian regime that is its main focus. Maybe this is just inevitable under the circumstances. We come across short periods of the life of numerous people, of different ages, occupations, interests, problems and needs. Some of them believe in the regime (and forced by reality to re-evaluate their beliefs), some serve it in a very cynical way, others try simply to survive and others to resist, successfully or unsuccessfully. I found the first - Abarchuk and Krymov - a very tragic group. Fascism and the holocaust also play a significant part in the book.

Shawnd, I think we do not get to know the end of any of the protagonists in the book, apart from those who actually die. And this was at the same time frustrating and appealing to me.

Despite its 855 pages, the book is very easy to read, the pages do fly and I wouldn't wish it to be shorter, rather the opposite! The book is more of a snapshot of a society, rather than a typical story, with a beginning, middle and a conclusion of the plot in the end, but I don't mean that necessarily as a disadvantage. My only criticism would be that all the protagonists come from a certain relatively privileged, well educated, thinking group of people - we do not get to listen at all to those who formed the lowest part of the soviet society.

As mentioned above, I read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I loved this book, but am having trouble figuring out what to say about it because it exists on so many levels: the literal, the fantastic, the satirical, the metaphysical, the humorous, the chilling, the theatrical, and the romantic.

The story begins when the devil, known as Woland, along with some of his entourage (including a large, talking cat), comes to Moscow, presumably in the 1930s, and engages a poet and an editor in conversation about the existence of Christ (religion was completely forbidden in Stalinist Russia). From this beginning, the devil, in a not entirely unpleasant way, wreaks havoc in Moscow, mostly among the literary and theatrical establishments, and notably when he conducts a theatrical event of his own. The second part of the book focuses on the master, a writer, and his lover Margarita, and the pact she makes with the devil, which leads among other things to her acting as the hostess at the devil's ball. Interwoven through both parts is the somewhat distorted story of the crucifixion, from the perspective of Pontius Pilate, told first by the devil to the poet and editor and then from the book that the master is writing about that very subject.

But this book is so much more than the plot and another version of the Faust legend. Without ever mentioning Stalin or what daily life had become in 1930s Russia, Bulgakov depicts the horror and terror of the times through Woland's actions and people's responses. We see several of the other issues of the time -- housing, foreign currency, and of course bureaucracy -- through the lens of the story, as Bulgakov explores themes of guilt, love, betrayal, and, especially, courage and cowardice. His use of language - as translated by the admirable Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in my edition -- is wonderful, especially in some of the great dramatic scenes of storms, Woland's theatrical event and ball, and characters turning into witches. The story of Pontius Pilate both reinforces the Moscow story and comments on it: as Richard Pevear points out in his insightful introduction, terror is not a 20th century invention.

I could go on and on, but I will just note that my edition included very helpful end notes that identified many of the literary and other references in the book.

I'm starting The Life of Insects by Victor Pelevin. I had hoped to finish something tedious that I am reading first, but I think I may be reading that book forever, so I'm going to just jump in with this one.

I've started The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin.

Once more, the only title I had in Mt TBR was a nonfiction so I am slogging my way through The Gulag Archipelago. Perhaps I can call it memoir by a Russian fiction author? I had read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the 70's. I'm looking forward to the reports from the people reading that one. From what I remember of it , Gulag is a super expanded form of that one--what happened in the other 3600 plus days of Solzhenitzen's 10 year inprisonment, as well as the history of the Gulag and the narratives of hundreds of other prisoners.

It's eye opening. While filled with Solzhenitsyn's wry humor, it's a story of injustice piled on injustice that is very hard to read.

One article on the net says that this book became required reading for high school students in Russia after the fall of the USSR. I hope it's true. Time after time, S laments that these people are forgotten. I hope they have their voice in their homeland.

I'm about a quarter of the way through the combined volumes 1 & 2, but I thought I'd check in before the month ended.

The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin

For me, the most interesting thing about this book was its form: entirely unattributed dialogue, mostly extremely short comments by a variety of people waiting over the course of two days in one of the Soviet Union's iconic queues. Sorokin is trying to create the whole feeling of waiting in the queue: the boredom, the conversations, the woman annoyed with her child, groups of people leaving the queue for drinks or food, couples flirting, monitors urging the people waiting to line up more neatly or counting off their names and numbers for pages and pages. There are even blank pages where one of the characters (for characters do emerge from the seemingly random talk) passes out or goes to sleep, and at the end there is a scene, still in dialogue, that takes place outside the queue. What are they queuing for? We never find out, and in fact, the descriptions of the item changes as the novel proceeds.

I found this book fascinating for its look at the queue phenomenon and for its experimental style, but otherwise it didn't really grab me.

I read Soul, by Andrey Platonov (touchstone is to the edition with other stories, which I don't have - yet!). It had been sitting on my bookshelves for a while as a result of having enjoyed The Railway, which was also translated by Robert Chandler.

Soul tells the story of a young man, born in Central Asia but educated in Moscow, who is sent back to his 'nation', the Dzhan (which means "soul" and is the title of the novel in Russian), to bring socialism to them. It's pretty grim subject matter a lot of the time: the Dzhan are so poor that their name arises because all they own is their own souls, and there's plenty of description of how dehumanising such poverty is. Nonetheless, it all seemed to be underlined by a strange optimism which meant that reading it wasn't anywhere near as depressing as it could have been.

There's an awful lot of complexity going on in Soul, most of which I missed on anything other than a purely superficial level: Platonov alludes to Persian and Zoroastrian mysticism and the epic hero narratives of Central Asia, amongst other things. Ultimately the book is about the search for "happiness", although this doesn't quite feel like the right word to me: it seemed to be more about the fundamental search for purpose and identity. I didn't get much about socialism and Soviet Russia from it if I'm honest, apart maybe from the fact that I don't think Platonov was of the opinion that socialism was the way to "happiness", especially for the poor of Central Asia.

Despite the fact that I was clearly missing a whole lot of subtext a lot of the time, I thought Soul was a fantastic novel, and I'm going to be looking up more Platonov. Why is he not more widely known?!

I have Soul (the edition with the other stories), and will have to dig it out of the TBR, now that I've read your review.

Wow. I have to say that I find these books all to be very unusual and interesting sounding. I didn't realize that about 20th c Russian fiction. I'm still reading Life of Insects, which also fits the unusual and interesting description.

I can't believe I'm not going to finish Life of Insects this month, but despite the cool premise and easy writing style, this book is going slowly for me. I'll report back when I finally finish it.

Apologies for being so silent this month...work and life taking priority over my beautiful vision of being an active moderator and contributor this month. I am very happy folks are reading and reporting back....

#63 shawnd

Hi. Thank you for your effort setting up this thread. I have been digging out the Russian books in my library that are not yet read and am now getting into them. I've even started reading a 21st Century Russian novel, Living Souls by Dmitry Bykov, which looks like it may be similar to the Chonkin novels, albeit a different time.

By the way, someone mentioned there is a third Ivan Chonkin by Vladimir Voinovich. It is called "Displaced Person" and was published in 2007. I do not think it is available in English yet. I have searched.

I found your link to the university syllabus in #49 very interesting; Thank you!

Better late than never. I finally finished The Life of Insects, Viktor Pelevin

I had mixed reactions to this book:

What I Liked: I loved the premise of satirizing life in late 20th Russia by showing people as sometimes-insects, or insects as sometimes-people. The whole book was terribly clever.

I also liked the chapter structure that sort of cycled between different insects (some interact with the others, some don't). Some of their stories were very interesting and amusing.

The language was quite simple and straightforward, which helped, because the imagery was sometimes difficult to sort out in my brain . . .

What I Disliked: because characters morphed from human to insect and back again, sometimes on a sentence-by-sentence level, and characters also morphed from one type of insect to another, it was often difficult to form a mental picture in my head of what I was reading.

Here's one example: “Seyozha especially loved finding windows: he would thrust his fingers into the earth and carefully feel the cold hard surface, then clean it off, trying to guess what he would see behind the glass.” As I read on in this story ("Paradise"), the metaphor here became clear and was rather clever. But reading this, my brain couldn't figure out what it looked like--windows in the dirt? Insects with fingers? Human digging for windows in the earth? Huh?! There were a lot of these moments.

I also found that I never really wanted to pick this up and read it. I had to force myself. Once I got into it, I liked it, but I was never that sad to put it down either. Often the characters were quite boring.

Rating: 3/5

#25 & 26>

I read Moscow to the End of the Line late in 2009 and liked it a lot. Here's my review:

Moscow Circles (also known as Moscow to the End of the Line) by Benedict Erofeev (also known as Venedikt Erofeyev) is a drunkenly hallucinatory ramble through the subways of Moscow. The book was written in 1976 with the Soviet regime still in power, and is a dark, dark comedy written as an indictment of the repressive Soviet system. In the beginning, there is quite a bit of effective, drunken humor and I laughed out loud several times. But the drinking is portrayed quite powerfully as a metaphor for the Russian people's opiate, used to cover the realities of an impossibly depressing lifestyle. As the book progresses, the humor fades and the nightmare is amplified. Very effective writing and a book that will haunt me for a long time.

I also read and enjoyed We a few years back.

For anyone looking for a collection of shorter works, I can recommend An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period from Gorki to Pasternak, edited by Bernard Guerney

I finished One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and thought it was well written and covered both an important subject and period in Russian history. I gave it four stars, but hesitate to say that I "enjoyed" the book given its subject matter.

Ivan Denisovich is a 38-year-old political prisoner, who was imprisoned because, toward the end of World War II, he surrendered to the Germans rather than be shot. Mother Russia brands him a traitor and imprisons him in a work camp in Siberia. He considers himself one of the lucky ones because his sentence was only 10 years. Later prisoners were given an automatic 25 year sentence, no matter what they did. On the day we meet him he is 8 years into his 10 year sentence. He's learned the ins and outs of the camp and is an excellent survivor without losing his humanity. He harms no one, and manages to feel some optimism every day. At the end of every day he counts up the good things that have happened to him that day.

This is a book and a character that I think will stay with me for a long time.

I did read The Zero Train, but it was only ok:

This novel is laid in an obscure part of the previous Soviet Union, where inhabitants of a small community wonder and despair about the section of railroad track passing through. A train once a day passes through with a sealed cargo. They do not know the contents of the cargo, and obsess about it as being somehow sinister. It feels like a remote community in Siberia, and reflects the isolation its people have from their government or for that matter, for people from more distant regions. A sense of decay seems to permeate the people's lives, and I ended up skipping portions of the novel to get to the end, which shows the meaninglessness of existence, hence the title of the novel.