The dogged Russophile tromps across the soft, hot sand. Vacationers are dozing through The Da Vinci Code, spilling their cold beer on a Michael Connelly thriller, or wading through Bill Clinton’s new memoir, My Life. The Russophile smirks with self-satisfaction. He is tackling “real literature” this summer – his left shoulder groans under the weight of a musty, dog-eared copy of War and Peace...
It doesn’t have to be like this! It’s time for the Russophile to get beyond Tolstoy (who really is better when the ground is covered with snow, not sand). Therefore, we offer this summer reading tip sheet for demanding Russophiles.
Fiction
If detective novels are your thing, you can’t go wrong with Boris Akunin. His Winter Queen (reviewed here last year) is now out in paperback (Random House, $12.95), and a second novel, Murder on the Leviathan, has just come out in hardcover (Random House, $21.95). Akunin weaves a good tale, and his portraits of 19th century Russian life are vividly engaging.
Looking for something “deeper”? If you haven’t read any of Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s work, pick up a copy of the recently released Medea and Her Children (Schocken Books, $20). The pace is slow and languorous, like the Crimean village in which this novel of love, family and attraction takes place. And it is positively dripping with Russian flavor. Just the sort of thing to savor in the shade of a beach umbrella.
Another favorite piece of new fiction for this summer is the translation of Vladimir Voinovich’s latest novel, Monumental Propaganda (Knopf, $25). It tells the story of Aglaya, a die-hard communist activist struggling (unsuccessfully) to come to grips with the reality of life in Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. Translator Andrew Bromfield masterfully conveys Voinovich’s stark, laconic style, as in this passage about Khrushchev’s discovery of corn during his trip to the US Midwest:
Meanwhile, in Aglaya’s opinion, the events that were taking place in the country were simply disgraceful. Baldie took a trip to America and spent some time in the state of Iowa. He saw how vigorously the maize grows there and decided that the shortcomings of the collective farm system could be counterbalanced if the expanses from Kushka to the tundra were sown with this magical cereal. One word was all it took, and the entire country was planted with maize. It didn’t grow. They divided the party into agricultural and municipal regional committees. It didn’t grow. They transformed the ministries into national economic councils – NECs – and the maize still didn’t grow; it refused. They gave up on the maize and set about introducing a reform of the Russian language that would have meant a hare was called a “her” and instead of “cucumber” people would have written “queucamber.”
If you are grazing the used book aisles and see a musty paperback copy of Edward Rutherfurd’s 1992 novel, Russka for a few bucks, snatch it up. Yes, it’s soap operaesque, yes it’s one of those infamously “grand, sweeping historical epics,” all but ready for a TV miniseries. But it is also fun. Also keep an eye out for any of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Porfiry Rostnikov detective novels, for example Murder on the Transsiberian Express.
If you can’t stay away from Tolstoy, you can’t go wrong with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Anna Karenina (Penguin, $16), just out in paperback (and just inducted into the Oprah Book Club, which has threatened the time-space continuum by thrusting dozens of copies of Tolstoy into Walmart’s book aisle). The duo’s translations are always fresh and new, and if you are relentlessly drawn to Lev Nikolaevich in the summer, Karenina is surely a better bet than the Brothers Karamazov.
If you merely want to read some classic Russian literature and Tolstoy just happens to be the first author that comes to mind, here are two excellent choices to get you reading outside the box: Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog (Grove, 1987, Mirra Ginsburg, translator) may be hard to find, but is well worth seeking out. It is a slim volume (no back pain to lug this one across the sand) and a personal favorite. The Twelve Chairs (Northwestern University Press, 1997), Ilf and Petrov’s masterpiece, is equally hilarious and has been superbly translated by John Richardson (no relation), who I not so secretly hope is working on a translation of Ilf & Petrov’s The Golden Calf.
Non-Fiction
If you seek something with a historical bent, here are a couple of recommended books for a good summer read.
Richard Pipes’ The Degaev Affair (Yale, $22.95) was actually released last spring, but you may have missed it. It tells the incredible story of how a turn of the (20th) century terrorist, wanted in Russia, disappeared to America and made a new life for himself in South Dakota.
It is always fascinating to read a biography of an explorer whose discovery is significant enough to have gotten a large chunk of land or sea named after him. Bering: The Russian Discovery of America, by Orcutt Frost, fits that bill. The writing is a bit dry, but then this story almost tells itself, and Frost is certainly an authority on the subject.
If our feature in the May/June 2004 issue on Akhmatova piqued your interest in literary lives under Stalin, then you’ll want to go out in search of a copy of Moscow Memoirs, by Emma Gerstein (Overlook, $35). The book caused something of a sensation when it came out in the late 1990s in Russia, because it challenged Russians’ long-held views of Mandelshtam, Akhmatova and others of that era. A fine read, but don’t go looking for it early this summer; it is not due out until September.
Finally, for those who cannot get enough of the Romanovs, there is a new volume comprising the personal correspondence between Catherine the Great and her great love, Grigory Potemkin, Love & Conquest (Northern Illinois, $40). It is full of the passion of a romance novel (“My silly eyes will become fixed watching you; not even an ounce of reason can penetrate my mind and God knows how foolish I am becoming.” – Catherine to Potemkin, 28 February 1774), but also thick with the minutiae of court life, military appointments and battlefield developments. Not everyone’s cup of kvas, but undeniably fascinating. But beware, this one weighs in at a Tolstoyan two pounds.
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