Summer Reading

The Russian dreambook of colour and flight

By Gina Ochsner

Portobello, 2009 ($23)

“The outward, visible world is miserable, I’ll give you that,” Olga said. “But there is an ocean of buoyancy in the unseen places of the human heart.”

This duality, voiced by one of Ochsner’s vividly drawn characters, stands at the center of this wonderful novel. The gritty, mean banality of everyday life in post-Soviet Russia (Perm, to be more exact) looms large, and one wants to retch at the public latrine, the sour living conditions, the cruel yard bullies, the unburied dead. Yet, in counterpoint there are slowly gathering lights, the illuminations that are ethereal dreams and bottomless human souls. Against these, the latrine and the bullies don’t stand a chance.

A woman dreams of flying and of love, while the tortured war veteran she longs for merely wants to fish. Another longs for meaning and affection, only to find both have been staring her in the face for years. There is a itinerant corpse offering sage advice, and there is a troika of ridiculous Americans.

Bouncing between farce, fable and fantasy, this is an entertaining read filled with rich characters and beautiful prose – a transformational tale.

Londongrad

By Reggie Nadelson

Walker & Company, 2009 ($25)

If your summer reading calls for something more in the murder mystery and thriller genre, you can’t go wrong with Nadelson’s latest installment (the 8th) in the Artie Cohen mystery series.

Cohen is a hard-drinking, no-nonsense New York cop who also happens to be a first generation Russian-American. His life is tangled with enough unsavory types to provide ample color and grist, and in this instance, it sucks him into the world of Russian oligarchs, FBI investigations and FSB intrigues. The catalyst is the murder of two young women, one of whom is his lover, Valentina, who also happens to be his best friend’s daughter.

Splicing in bits of current events, most notably the radioactive murder of Alexander Litvinenko, Nadelson fashions a timely tale of crossed loyalties and international conspiracies that should serve many well as a guilty summer pleasure.

Kamchatka

By Igor Shpilenok & Patrico Robles Gil

Sierra Madre, 2009 ($29)

Readers of Russian Life are well familiar with the photography of Igor Shpilenok from the countless stories by him and his wife, Laura Williams, that have appeared in our pages, covering Russia’s wildlife, national parks and remote regions.

Now Shpilenok has teamed up with a Mexican wildlife photographer and created a beautiful collector’s edition photo book on Kamchatka. Best of all, Shpilenok has himself penned a loving essay (nicely translated by Williams) to anchor the book’s photos.

The wild beauty of Kamchatka, captured in Igor’s and Patrico’s stunning photos of bears, eagles, volcanoes and salmon, is  nothing short of awe-inspiring. That proceeds from the book’s sale are going to benefit the Wild Foundation, to help in the continued lobbying for wild spaces, is a testament to the fact that Igor is much more than a photographer – he is an activist passionately committed to his subject. Perhaps this is why his photography is so inspiring.

**This book can only be ordered through the Wild Foundation: www.wild.org (search “kamchatka”)
or phone 303-442-8811

Ballerina

First Run Features, 2009 ($24.95)

You don’t have to be enamored of Russian ballet to be struck by its beauty, by the intense years of dedication and hard work (to say nothing of innate talent) it takes to succeed in the rarified air of the Mariinsky or the Bolshoi.

This excellent new documentary takes you behind the scenes at the world-renowned Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg, the guardian of Russian classical ballet (see Russian Life, Nov/Dec 2008). It traces the lives and fortunes of a handful of ballerinas in training, following recent graduates through their first years of service in the Mariinsky, while comparing their careers with those of world-renowned primas. In all, it is an astoundingly intimate, up-close portrait of these dancers’ lives.

One of the most unexpectedly fascinating parts of the film, however, is when the cameras turn to interview a leading dancer from Paris. His declaration of the unparalleled toughness and grit of Russian dancers is insightful as only the judgement of one’s peers can be.

To order this DVD, visit:

firstrunfeatures.com

or phone 800-229-8575

Red Sky, Black Death

By Anna Timofeyevna-Yegorova

Slavica, 2009 ($29.95)

This surprisingly intense memoir of a village girl swept up by life in Moscow (working on building the Metro) during the early years of Bolshevik rule takes on added importance and excitement as she joins the women’s air corps and becomes a decorated war pilot.

Yegorova tells her life story in short, engaging pieces that are astoundingly rich in detail and, in many instances (a near-suicide mission dropping smoke bombs, her capture after being shot down, her interrogation by SMERSH) harrowing. Ably translated by Margarita Ponomaryova and Kim Green, Yegorova’s memoir gives a human scale view of pre-war purges, of socialist construction projects, of soldiers’ lives during the war, of what it meant to be a female combat pilot, of what repatriated prisoners went through on returning to Russia – in short, a tale of a heroic life through the middle of the last century. As Yegorova concludes her story:

“The war showed the whole world who these ‘women in Russian villages’ are and how their hearts can soar in the name of their motherland.”

WAVE OF TERROR

By Theodor Odrach

Academy Chicago, 2009 ($19.95)

In the late 1930s, Fedir Sholomitsky lived in Pinsk, Belorussia, working as a schoolteacher and publishing an underground, anti-communist newspaper. Hunted by the Soviets, he eventually created a new identity for himself, escaped to Czechoslovakia, then Germany and finally Canada.

So it was at the age of 42, that Theodor Odrach settled into life in Toronto, working in a printing shop by day and writing stories, in Ukrainian, by night. He would live only another 11 years, but the stories he created live on thanks to the luminous translations of his daughter, Erma.

Compared to Solzhenitsyn and Orwell for his journalistic storytelling abilities, Odrach has a terse, compact writing style. In Wave of Terror, he draws on a wealth of personal experience and his natural gifts as a storyteller to provide an almost documentary tale  of the Stalinist steamrollering of rural Belorussia and Ukraine in 1939, after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (see this issue, page 19).