Summer is usually a time for lighter entertainment: pulp fiction, blockbuster movies, undemanding music. This summer’s offerings for Russophiles may not quite meet this “lightweight” profile. But then who are we to judge? Here are some recommended items to help bring a taste of Russia to your summer. (Check the Russian Life website for more selections.)
The People’s Act of Love
James Meek (Canongate: $24)
Prison camps and cannibalism, the Civil War and religious castrates, the Czech Legion and a remote Siberian town – it hardly sounds like the sort of light reading one might want in a summer read. But this book is surprising on many levels.
It helps that the action takes place in Siberia – a breadth of geography within which anything seems imaginable... Escaped convict Samarin wanders into a remote Siberian village inhabited by religious castrates and run by 90 survivors of the Czech Legion. A shaman is murdered. The convict is suspected and put on trial by the maniacal Matula (leader of the Czechs). A rudderless, lovelorn, single-mother falls for the convict. She, by the way, followed her castrate husband, Decembrist-like, into this hopeless place of self-imposed exile. Meanwhile, hovering just beyond the horizon, are the Reds.
But a plot is just something to keep readers interested while the author explores ideas and themes, picking at memories and dreams. Meek probes the limits of love and self-sacrifice: what one must give to impress the future. As Samarin muses: “What looks like an act of evil to a single person is the people’s act of love to the future itself.” Meek’s language is vividly descriptive, his characters complex and believable, and the history (but for one major anachronism, as he admits) on key.
The Elagin Affair and Other Stories
By Ivan Bunin (Ivan R. Dee: $25)
If you have never read Bunin – Russia’s first Nobel laureate for literature – this volume is a gift. If you are already familiar with Bunin, this gift is an excellent excuse to read him again. Graham Hettlinger’s new translations of Bunin’s stories are simply superb – preserving the beauty and power of Bunin’s prose, about which more can be written than these pages can contain. Suffice it to share the opening paragraphs of two of the stories in this volume. First, from the title story:
“It was a strange and terrible affair. Inexplicable. Confounding.... At first, perhaps, it seems simple – like the plot of a cheap paperback (everyone in town referred to it this way). But a slight shift in perspective – and suddenly it turns elusive, recondite – resists all easy answers. Lends itself, almost, to the writing of real literature....”
Second, from Mitya’s Love:
“The ninth of March was Mitya’s last happy day in Moscow. So it seemed, at least, to him.”
If you are not drawn in by these first lines, then perhaps Russian literature is not for you.
Memoirs of a Muse
Lara Vapnyar (Pantheon: $22.95)
Tanya wants to be a muse, a support and inspiration to a Great Man. As a Soviet schoolgirl of 13, she fantasizes about dead old writers, particularly Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whom her grandmother married. She later emigrates to the U.S., discovers an up-and-coming writer and moves in as his muse.
Written in the first person with a light and easy tone that is inviting and personal, Memoirs sweeps you along on a young woman’s bumpy voyage of self-discovery, through the slow crashing of her dreams into the reality of life-as-she-has-chosen-it. Yearning for immortality and fulfillment as a muse, Tanya realizes, doesn’t do you any good. And so she finds a life. And then becomes a muse in a way she never expected.
The Third Shore
Women’s Fiction from East Central Europe
(Northwestern Univ. Press: $19.95)
This collection of works from the 1990s by 26 women authors from 18 nations of “unbound Europe” is an eclectic and satisfying read. It offers as many different styles as the authors themselves, but a unity of concern, shaped by what it meant to be female in communist Eastern Europe. The title (“Third Shore”) refers to the elusive third path of culture and human affairs that so many in Eastern Europe and Russia have sought in the last two decades: neither entirely toward the ways of the West, nor back to the bankrupt past of communism.
The Helmet of HorroR Victor Pelevin (Canongate: $18.95)
Another Pelevin-penned allegory of monumental proportions. This time the myth of the Minotaur is translated into cyberspace – a merciless exploration of the labyrinths we willingly enter and can not escape from.
The Death of Achilles
Boris Akunin (Random House: $12.95)
This is the fourth of Akunin’s historical fiction cum detective novels to be translated into English. It once again features the unflappable “Slavic Sherlock”: Erast Petrovich Fandorin. Set in 1882, it follows Fandorin as he tackles the case of a national hero who has died in the bed of a courtesan, which might well be connected with a coup and certainly has something to do with a huge suitcase of cash.
For links to these and other reviewed items, visit the Russian Life website.
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
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