Last summer, when I visited Russia after an absence as long as the combined age of my young daughters, I paid tribute to the bookshops of both capitals. One afternoon in late June I met a childhood friend at D'Anthès, a modish Moscow restaurant named after the Frenchman who had mortally wounded Pushkin. A violent downpour interrupted my postprandial stroll up Myasnintskaya Street, and I ducked into an archway only to find myself before the entrance to a “book salon.”
A parti-colored cover caught my eye as I browsed. Printed on it were the Russian words: “The book for the sake of which united the writers whom it is impossible to unite.” Paul E. Richardson, the American publisher of Russian Life magazine, has now brought a modified version in English translation titled Life Stories. The proceeds go to “benefit Russian hospice care.”
Reviewed here:
Life Stories: Original Works by Russian Writers, edited by Paul E. Richardson; Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker
Life Stories showcases short stories, novel excerpts and essays by 19 living Russian-language authors (four women, 15 men), the eldest born in 1932, the youngest in 1975. Three generations are represented: those born in the 1930s and early '40s; in the late 1940s and '50s; and in the 1960s, the members of the last Soviet generation, to which this reviewer once belonged.
Anglo-American readers will readily recognize the names of Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin and Viktor Yerofeyev. Yet Life Stories is missing three of the original volume's bigger guns – Boris Akunin, Tatyana Tolstaya and Ludmila Ulitskaya. A few other stories have been added: Dina Rubina's rambling novella Fog and Marina Moskvina's Trash Can for the Diamond Sutra, in which a Jewish-Russian lady is deemed “the earthly reincarnation of the goddess Devi.”
Life Stories: Original Works by Russian Writers, edited by Paul E. Richardson, Stories for Good/Russian Information Services, 331 pages, $27
The title notwithstanding, a line should probably be drawn not between fiction and non-fiction in Life Stories but between a certain compulsive or reactive memoirism in much of post-Soviet writing and the writers' motion away from both the emblazoned red and the oily black of Putin's Russia.
Of the collection's two small gems, one bleeds with documentary authenticity and the other transports us to another world. Sergei Lukyanenko's The Heart of a Snark, deftly translated by Liv Bliss, not only takes stock of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark but also conjures up Conradian suspense.
A young couple, Alexander and Alina, travel from Earth to another planet in order to charter a boat with a captain and go out fishing for a snark. A snark's heart is supposed to be a panacea, and the captain assumes his clients are terminally ill. The end of the expedition surprises the seasoned captain, inviting the reader to regard Lukyanenko's fantasy as a parable of the “New Russians'” hedonism.
Artistically, Lukyanenko's antithesis is Zakhar Prilepin, writer and activist of the National-Bolshevik Party. His Grandmother, Wasps, Watermelon employs large-scale tropes, replete with Babel's vibrancy and physicality, to conjure up a historical allegory of the end of the Russian (and Soviet) village. Deborah Hoffman has faithfully rendered Prilepin's style: “That's how the village of my memories looks now. As if someone had scooped the honeyed flesh of August out of her, leaving the grey behind along with the last of the flies.
“Everyone died. The ones that didn't die were murdered. The ones who weren't murdered, finished the job themselves.”
